


Some Days are for Dying

by jaded_heron



Category: Metalocalypse (Cartoon)
Genre: Extremely Slow Burn, Gen, M/M, Magnus is not very sympathetic so far but it will get better, Multi, Pickles has fully undiagnosed CPTSD and the portrayal is with extreme realism, There are some very fun dream sequences in this, Trans Pickles the Drummer, late 90s setting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:34:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25988281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaded_heron/pseuds/jaded_heron
Summary: Pickles dive-bombed Snakes N Barrels directly into the dust.  There's no other way to put it.  He's been living in a van down by the river for the last couple of years, spending his royalties checks on drugs and booze.There's a couple of prospects, though.  His best friend has a band that Pickles thinks might actually make it, some day, and it's a way to get out of the mess he's gotten himself into at the feet of Magnus Hammersmith.  The president of his fanclub from back in the day has a business degree, now, and the woman who sold him H when he used to wear headbands is back in town and dealing only in withering looks and weed, these days.It's 1996, and it's all coming together.
Relationships: Nathan Explosion/Pickles the Drummer
Comments: 18
Kudos: 22





	1. Across the Universe

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like before he is in Dethklok, Pickles mainly knows Nathan, and Pickles is kind of really letting Nathan rent a lot of space in his head because he can sense, hey, this kid has a future. Things really pick up after this chapter, as I figured out I wanted to make things more coherent and write more chapters than I had initially planned.

Pickles can hear, gentle, the pale digital whine of the box television, can see the reflection of his own tired form in the dark of the horror movie they’re slugging through. The weed is dragging his body down, weighing him down, like maybe he and Nathan have swapped physical existences and now he’s a behemoth being similarly punished by the force of gravity on him. He listens to Nathan cough, a little, and the bubble of the bong; watches in the faint glare in the screen the lighter when Nathan uses it. A woman on screen screams as her stomach is cut open, and Nathan snorts, at it, and tells Pickles in a low voice about how they did the special effects, how he’s seen it, made it, himself, for a music video with his old band and it looks really fake without any camera filters and in the daylight. Pickles wants to tell him yeah, fuck, of course it looks fake in the daylight, but when he looks at Nathan, Nathan is looking right at him, already, and for some reason that catches him off guard enough that he forgets what he was going to say. It feels heavy, right then, and so he cracks a smile at Nathan and asks him, “Why’re you lookin’ at me, dude?” and Nathan offers him the bong as an answer, and instead of pressing further he just takes another hit.

Pickles watches the reflection of Nathan Explosion in the television while he talks over the movie-- Nathan talks about his band, right then, Dethklok, about his girlfriend, and her band, and how she doesn’t get what kind of brutal shit he’s trying to do. He tells Pickles about his roommate, or ex-roommate, Dave, he tells Pickles about a cool lizard he saw that morning that reminded him of Pickles, made him give him a call. He asks Pickles if he really knows that guy Mark from that party last month, after the Bayou of Blood show, does he remember? After Magnus freaked out and left mid-set, and so Pickles came down to drink with Nathan, that guy Mark they fought, does he remember? With his long blonde hair and he painted his nails and he plays the drums, does he remember? And Finally Pickles tells him, “Fuck, yeah already, I remember” and Nathan asks for his number, and Pickles laughs and tells him he doesn’t have it, and Nathan is so disappointed, in his big mammoth face, Pickles tells him not to worry, he’ll get it. Pickles isn’t sure how he’s going to get it, but he doesn’t tell Nathan that part.

Nathan starts to tell Pickles about how he was thinking about painting his nails, and he asks if it’s gay even if he’s painting them black, if Pickles thinks he can pull it off, and then Pickles stops him and asks him, “Why do you want to talk to Mark so bad?” and Nathan tells him, “He has a double bass kit,” and Pickles snorts at him and tells him, “That don’t mean he’s any good, dude.” And Nathan sneers at him, a little, punches him on the shoulder in a way that is definitely soft only to Nathan Explosion, not anyone else, and tells Pickles not to come at him if he’s not even in the band.

Something about that just ticks Pickles the hell off, because-- for a long time now, hanging out with Nathan, he’s wondered why the  _ fuck _ he isn’t in Nathan’s band. He has felt like a long time like he has wanted to, but it’s pathetic, to want to, and so he’s been trying to just be cool and wait for Nathan to wake up one day and realize he’s had a rhythm guitarist sleeping on his couch twice a week, and then Pickles could leave Bayou of Blood behind with Magnus and all his weird  _ crap.  _ Pickles likes the rest of them-- Skwisgaar, and Will, and their shitty little drum machine.

“Maybe I could be in the band, then,” he says, and Nathan laughs and waits a few seconds, and then turns a little where he’s sitting and asks him, “What, really?” and Pickles says, “Yeah, really.” And they are quiet, a couple of seconds, and Pickles waits for questions on questions to tumble out of Nathan’s mouth, but they don’t, he just sits back against the seat of the couch and picks his bong back up to kill the rest of Pickles’ weed. It starts to become Pickles’ turn to babble.

“I can play rhythm. Blondie won’t have to record his own rhythm sets before and then play against himself on stage,” and Nathan nods at him, and Pickles goes in again, “And I can write Will’s basslines. His basslines suck.” and Nathan snorts and tells him not to tell Will that. “And when you get a fuckin’ drummer, I can write his lines, too, I did it in Snakes N Barrels and I do it for BoB, so you don’t have to worry if you pick a weak fuck like Mark Tomlinson.” and that seems to be interesting, to Nathan, because he suddenly looks all interested in what Pickles is saying, like he wasn’t, before, his eyelids ticked a little further open and his smile showing out, but just barely. It makes Pickles so nervous.

“You play the drums?” Nathan asks him, and Pickles tells him, “No, I just write ‘em.”

“ _ Could you  _ play the drums, though?” Nathan asks him, again, and Pickles sees him, peeling his shoulder out from the couch to face Pickles again, like he’s an old, old sticker coming off the wall, and Pickles huffs out, and rolls his eyes and settles into the sofa a bit while he thinks it over.

“ _ Maybe  _ I could play the drums, yeah. Fuckin’--” he is so bored of this conversation, now. He’s not meant to be talking about the drums. He’s not interested in writing the drumlines for the drum machine, and not being in Dethklok, if that’s what Nathan is getting at. “If I went to some clinics, or whatever, I could do-- three months, tops.”

“Okay, then, yeah.”

“Yeah what?”

“Okay, then, yeah, in three months you can be the drummer for Dethklok.”

And it doesn’t feel real, when he laughs, goes “Yeah,  _ okay _ , dude,” and he finishes Nathan’s whiskey nibs off, and they watch another two horror movies until they both conk out on Nathan’s sofa he found in some alley, somewhere. It doesn’t feel real when he goes to the drum clinics, or when he uses an entire residuals check to buy a used drum kit between the parts he steals and the parts he’s given, and it doesn’t feel real when he starts to get kind of okay, actually.

The first time that it feels like he is really, actually going to be doing this thing is his audition-- where Mark Tomlinson, is there, and some girl with a bad black mullet like she thinks she’s Joan Jett, except with a labrys tattoo on her shoulder so she’d not ever sing half of Joan Jett’s songs, whose voice is so deep and so rich Pickles almost mistakes her for Nathan when she pipes up from behind him. And Mark is first-- and he sucks, because he can kick fast but he’s bad at coordinating the rest of it. He plays a single bass kit with another bass latched on, not a double bass kit, essentially. Just a couple of regular beats with an extra heartbeat added in. It’s a miscarriage, not twins. Fuck, what a fucked up thought. He makes note of it, to say it to Nathan, later, so Nathan can think he’s fucked up enough to be in his band.

Julie-- her name is Julie, she doesn’t give a last name, just says it in that miles-deep voice that makes Pickles’ guts uneasy-- plays a better set. She’s better than Pickles thinks he will be, and he’s sure, hearing her, that she’s played for years. He’s sure, hearing here, feeling those double kicks in his chest, that Nathan will hear it and Nathan will want to have her, instead, because she’s got miles of experience more than Pickles and Nathan, right then, has a band full of newbies.

Pickles’ stomach is flipping, his entire set-- he gets some quadruples, in, and he’s wild, as he plays. He’s trying to feel the beat in his chest like he did, for Julie’s set, but all he gets is lactic acid buildup in his calves and thrumming in his ears like tinnitus. Nathan lets them know he’ll talk it over, all the guys, they’ll talk it over. He tells them they all can leave, except for Pickles-- and he asks Pickles, in front of them all, Mark and Julie, if he’s going to sleep over again, tonight.

And it burns him, it’s so embarrassing, and he doesn’t know why.

It’s four days, he stays at Nathan’s. He doesn’t stay there, consecutive days, because he likes to leave before Nathan can kick him out. He never likes the conversation, in general, when he’s kicked out or asked to leave-- feeling like he’s been wallowing in welcome that isn’t any longer extended. Worrying, that he’s trying the friendship. He feels like Nathan not saying anything to him has to mean they’ve picked Julie; they’re sure of it, almost. He packs a bowl in Nathan’s living room, on day four, and eavesdrops on a hushed conversation in the kitchen that Nathan has where he’s quiet, a long time, and says in a soft voice, “three months, yeah” into the receiver, and he’s quiet almost another thirty seconds before he says even softer, “six years. That’s what I’m saying.” It burns him, to realize, in that moment, why he’s hung around. Like he can’t leave Nathan alone, so that Nathan can’t think about the audition, too much.

So that Nathan can’t sit him down and tell him he isn’t a good enough drummer, so that Nathan won’t be disappointed in him and Pickles won’t be left to wallow in how he’s too small and old and washed up to be brutal. In how pathetic it was, for him to learn a new instrument for a band that hasn’t even made it yet. To think about maybe  _ why _ he may have done that, and wallow in that hole, too.

He leaves, when Nathan hangs up, tells him he has somewhere to go and won’t tell him where, and Nathan doesn’t really care about Pickles, not really, so he takes the packed bowl and lights up and tells Pickles to give him a call when he gets more weed. And Pickles tells him yeah, and slips out.

It’s two weeks-- he’s fucked up, two weeks, drunk two weeks, avoiding shooting up but doing everything else, two weeks. It makes him feel shitty because even if they were going to go for him, you can’t pick a drummer that disappears for two weeks to binge drink and sweat in the back of his van about whether he should go buy some heroin. Not if you want to be somebody, eventually. 

Pickles tapes a photo he had taken, in Florida, the first time he was there unattached-- of him, and his ex-wife, and Nathan with shoulder-length hair and a tongue ring. Of Nathan’s girl, at the time, who used to throw dishes at him when she was angry and who used to pull her shirt up and press her tits on the windows at truckers just to bother Nathan. Pickles remembers seeing it, one time, because when he’d heard about it he’d figured Nathan would just get pissed and banter with her, and instead Nathan had just seemed all... sad, and tired.

What is all of this? What is he doing? What the fuck time is it, anyway? He’s drunk, and it’s the worst kind of drunk-- because he remembers every time he’s stood too close to Nathan Explosion and worried that if he breathed, Nathan would think that Pickles is smelling him. And he’s worried and anxious about how it makes him worried and anxious-- and he’s thinking about whether he maybe cares too much, and whether he should worry about caring too much, and that’s what makes him make a weed buy and call Nathan up.

There’s relief, in Nathan’s voice, when Pickles calls him-- a pay phone, near a bodega across the city. Nathan tells Pickles he’s a hard guy to get ahold of, and Pickles laughs and tells him it’s by design. Pickles asks him when Nathan tried to call him, and Nathan tells him not to worry about it, and Pickles bites his tongue, honest-to-god bites it because he wants to tell Nathan he isn’t worried, he just wants to know. Pickles tells him he’s got good stuff, and he wants to come over, and Nathan tells him “So come, then” and it makes Pickles feel weak, somehow. Embarrassed, like he forgot that was an option.

And when he gets there he’s all nerves-- jittery, under his skin. His fingers are itchy and he keeps pulling apart his cuticles. He packs the bowl, again, and it feels like deja vu in a way that feels like deja vu, and the pot in his lungs and then his blood and then his brain reminds him, oh yeah, it’s because him and Nathan are friends. Oh yeah, Nathan is a good friend, to him, a friend of his for years, now. He passes the bowl to Nathan when it sits down, and smiles at him, lazy, now that his brain has sat back in his skull, right, and the anxious thoughts from the last two weeks feel so far away.

He tells Nathan, “Fuck, what’s with that?” and Nathan asks him, “What?” and Pickles goes, “No, not like that, I just like hangin’ out with you, dude.” and Nathan laughs, at him, and tells Pickles, “You’re high.” Pickles looks in his reflection in the TV, again, like he’d done weeks earlier, and he feels sad, somehow. Dragged down by remembering when he’d been there, last, when he’d been there before the audition and he was on the precipice of the new opportunity. “Yeah,” he says, after a while, and he can feel Nathan’s eyes on him, after. There’s that weird moment, again, but Pickles doesn’t know what Nathan means to say to him, because he’s already offered him a (probably failed) audition.

“Murderface asked me if you’re a homo,” and Pickles screws up his eyebrows and tells him, “What.” and Nathan says, again. “William Murderface. He keeps asking me if you’re a homo.”

“I’m not a homo, dude,” and Nathan rolls his eyes, and he scoffs, and he makes a big display of it, scoffing. Pickles doesn’t know what the fuck that is about, this... put-upon scoff, and he doesn’t know what the fuck is up with him that he can tell the difference between a fake Nathan scoff and a real one. He doesn’t say anything until Nathan does.

“It’s okay if you are, though,” and Pickles feels like it’’s because Nathan knows something about him that Pickles hasn’t told him. Pickles bristles, a little.

“Even if I was I wouldn’t be for fucking *Will*, I’ll tell you that.”

“Fuck, me either.”

And Nathan snorts, about it, again. A real snort. Fucking weird, what is this conversation. Maybe Pickles should ask, maybe he’s right to do that.

“What is this conversation?” and it’s Nathan to look at himself in the TV. Pickles looks at Nathan looking at himself in the TV, and they meet eyes, in the TV. A woman on screen has her head chopped off, and the camera focuses in on the meaty hole, left behind, and Nathan goes, “Oh, fuck,” as if he hasn’t seen this movie ten times, before. Pickles feels so... impatient.

“So why does it matter if Will thinks I’m a queer, then?” and Nathan tells him, “Oh, right.”

And Pickles is so annoyed. Pickles is so beyond annoyed.

“Oh right  _ what _ ” and Nathan tells him easy, like that-- “You’re in the band.”


	2. Woman of Salem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pickles goes to see his friends.

There was a time, in his life, when Pickles the Drummer believed well and truly that Frances was his one, true love; and then she disappeared, and he found a new H dealer, and the relationship that never materialized between them was lost in the fog of years. When he caught up with her in another decade on another coast she was a lesbian and she had a tattoo he didn’t recognize, of a big, ugly cicada, that reached up to a crescent moon on her inside bicep. She told him for two hours about how much she loved her girlfriend and how the tattoo was there, for her, for her  _ rebirth _ having learned to love her. He still remembers it, the way her eyes lit up, and she told him how free, she felt, loving women, unbeholden to the invisible man that she informs Pickles lives right behind all women, and peers into the backs of their heads, to watch what they do through their own eyes and get off on it. She gives him a book, to read about it, and he leaves it in his van for a year because he is not even close to smart enough to get through all the paragraphs of angry lesbian philosophy. He gets over it, quickly, the feeling-out-of-his-depth around her, because Frances is a hundred times more cool and interesting than when she felt attainable, than when she did more illegal things with Pickles and when she pretended not to care how old he was.  _ (When he was young enough that maybe she should have.) _

He likes that she has crows feet from smiling, now. That she’s let her eyebrows grow in, and they show him what she’s thinking. She sits back on her big, comfy couch, neon orange in peeks between throw blankets in blinding patterns, while Pickles and Blair (the girlfriend, Blair) get absolutely smacked on anything you don’t inject. MDMA, this time, but mushrooms or acid or weed or whatever, other times. They write nonsense songs, together. It’s a nice place to crash if he’s especially sad or if the gym he showers at is closed. Blair plays it, the harpsichord, idly, background music to the conversation. He’s grateful to her, for it, because when he’s rolling if he pays too much attention to the air moving in his ears he’ll get nauseous. He will be mortified to vomit in this apartment, again.

“I think you should just-- guhh-- you should just tell him, you know?” and she’s giggling, giggling, and Pickles watches Frances watch her more than he really watches her.

It makes him feel warm, seeing Frances love somebody. She’d always been this husk of a person, in the old days, and Pickles had known her, like that, and he felt like she saw him the same way. He’d wanted to be two broken people, together, with her. Die in bed, high, some day. It was nicer to see color in her face, to see her be unbroken, whole, with somebody good. Like he’s eaten a bunch of cotton candy that also is somehow warm, inside him.

“Tell him  _ what _ ?” Pickles asks her, imploring. “He’s the one tellin’ me things, recently, I don’t got nothin’ to share.”

“About his  _ girlfriend _ ,” Blair whines, and Pickles laughs at her, louder, and tells her, “What  _ girlfriend _ ,” all incredulous, not even a question.

“No, that you-- with her tits out, in the window, Pickles! That you felt bad!”

She’s being too loud, and Frances lets her know by tangling their hands together, and kissing her, on her pudgy white shoulder. Pickles doesn’t know how to cope with it, sometimes, how sweet they are together; Frances catches Blair’s eye, and then they’re kissing, right there, in front of him, and it twists him up even more because he doesn’t know if it’s more rude to look away. Blair catches him, with his face all twisted up, and laughs at him.

“Are you staying?” Frances asks, and it’s clear she doesn’t want him to, but like she always is, like she always has been, she will acquiesce to him if he asks nice enough. She’s like a bag of bones, that woman, with curly hair bleached out blonde and a hook nose Blair certainly leads her around by, and her shirts that always have a high neckline, because even if she’s been clean off H for ten years you can still see her ribs between her breasts.

“Nah,” Pickles offers, because he’s good, he wants to be good. He wants to go sleep in his van like he’s been avoiding, and let Blair play her harpsichord at Frances, and let them just be in love, together, untainted by his unconquerable loneliness. The weed he’s buying is already in a little bag, on the table. He’s already paid her, as soon as he’s walked in the door. The E is just a gift, because they think he’s funny, and because he’s the only person Frances knows from the old days who is still cool and who would still take it.

Because he’s never once made himself unsafe, to Frances, even if the way he’d thought he was in love with her, when she sold to him those first few years, was dangerous.

It’s quiet, another while longer, and Pickles’ mouth is so dry, inside, he feels like surely he’s been eating silica gel crystals from the store. Like he’s had potato chips flavored with vinegar and corn starch. He drinks some more of Blair’s nice gin, and Blair couldn’t be more pleased, about it. Frances rubs her fingers in the back of Blair’s buzzed head, and Pickles bets it’s soft, soft, and he wants to touch it, but he knows that’s the Molly, talking, and you can’t just go around fucking petting people.

“What is his band called, again?” Blair asks, and Pickles is going to answer, and then Frances tells her, “Dethklok,” and he realizes the question was about Pickles, about Pickles’ band, they’re not still harping on Nathan. Pickles pulls his nose, a bit. A habit, when he’s trying not to give away too much of his line of thinking.

“It’s not spelled how you think, though, uh-- d-e-t-h-k-l-o-k. Dethklok.”

“Funky,” Frances adds, in this mirthless tone that she uses to congratulate Pickles on things she knows he won’t accept thanks for. He nods. She gives him finger guns for daring to try being cool, in her home, and he snorts at her for it.

“Is Magnus in it?” Blair asks him, and Frances offers an answer for him, again, “ _ No, _ ” hard like that.  _ No _ . Like not only is Magnus not allowed to be in Dethklok, according to this lesbian pot dealer in downtown Tampa, but also he cannot be mentioned, thought of, or considered. Pickles thought of them as kind of twins, like Magnus, definitely, is the evil twin, and he doesn’t know the history there, really, because they met before Pickles knew Magnus and after Pickles knew Frances, the first time, and neither of them would tell him the truth if he had the balls to ask. Blair pipes up, “God, it’s about time-- Maggie needs to just, like, record over himself. Be his  _ own  _ band.”

Pickles laughs with them, too, but Frances’ eyes on him are steel cold, and he can feel them, pressing into his shoulder like bullets or cattle prods or something else terrible, and he knows, surely, she must know.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay, man?” She asks him, and he shrugs it off and he tells her, “No, I’m-- I’ll be fine. Fresh batteries in the tape deck, and all.” He hates lying to them, once, and so he does it a few more times to make himself feel better about the first one.

Blair gives him a Yoko Ono tape, and he promises her he will listen to it, but he’s busy with his primer of angry men over electric guitar, and so it ends up under the stacked up mattress pads he calls a bed. 

* * * * *

In his vivid E dreams he and Magnus are tomcats in an alley, ripping at eachother’s throats. Pickles-cat is this little Japanese bobtail, like Pickles has seen in cartoons, and Magnus-cat is this gnarled-looking, one-eyed, mangled thing. A maine coon, maybe. Pickles is exhausted of fighting, of the great and terrible yowling, of the mix of garbage juice and blood, and he gets a lucky blow, in, his teeth in Magnus’ neck, and at once they are human beings again. They're in a motel in Malibu, 1990, that Pickles had been in for his honeymoon, and instead of the model he'd convinced himself it was a good idea to marry in the waterbed, frotting up against him, it's Magnus. Magnus' hands up his back, Magnus' voice, in his ear. Pickles has his teeth in Magnus' neck, from when they were alley cats, and he bites down too hard, and there’s a splash of blood into his mouth that turns into sand as soon as it hits his tongue. Magnus laughs at him, in that tired way he does, and tells him, “Be careful of those chompers, kid.”

He’s drowning, drowning, his throat dry as Magnus deflates in the water bed into play sand, rams all of his dead, sahara-ed mass down Pickles’ gullet while Pickles squirms around. He wakes up, coughing, and pours out of the van in dire need of a bodega in which he can buy a water for fifty cents. His throat is scorching, the whole time, and he wishes he would have had the forethought to park somewhere near a fountain, or better, to have gone somewhere he could buy a gallon jug of the good stuff to drink down, so he wouldn’t have to walk around, like that, feeling as though he might as well be chewing razorblades and broken glass and then dragging his tongue on the pavement.

The last time he did E, and it dried him out this bad, he’d dreamed he was trying to shotgun a Pabst Blue Ribbon that was just fucking full of ticks. Something good, American, less full of amalgamations of what Magnus Hammersmith might sound like, crunched all up into his ears. Eugh.  


There’s a man walking down the street, selling waters for a quarter. It’s a steal, and Pickles uses a dollar to get four of them. He downs them, immediately, and he doesn’t care of people passing him while he trudges around and throats as many molecules as his weenie body can handle think he’s got to be on something, because he is on something, they're completely right. When he gets back to his van he starts to assemble the necessary implements to give the weed he’s just bought a trial-run, and he remembers the Yoko Ono tape he’s been given. He figures it  _ has  _ to be easier to parse than the Adrienne Rich, at least for a dumbass of his particular variety, and so he pops it into his tape deck and gets things rolling.

The day goes by, in the rear window of his van; people walking, tail ends of conversations and middles of greetings, feet, on the pavement, the air in his ears, the sun, sliding across the window like a wet yolk turning lighter in the hot, greased pan of the sky. Sunset, pink, swirling in with the lilting female voice cloying at him with meaning, with something that should help him, should bring him somewhere, if he isn’t as worthless a creature as he’s sure he probably is. The weed makes his body heavy, grounds him, in minutes and seconds that feel for once real and undistorted. It’s as though the rest of the time, when he isn’t fucked up, the whole of his being is flying around and he can’t see anything or hear anything properly, like everyone is a bizarre homunculus and gravity is upside-down, and the pot presses everything back into its expected mold.

The tape finishes, again, and he starts it over, skipping forward so he can listen to what is quickly becoming a favorite track. He reads the jacket of the tape, for the set list--  _ Woman of Salem _ . The chanting at the end got him. There’s something deep and dark about it, even in Ono’s gentle singing and the soft beat of the bongos, something heavy that he wasn’t able ever to understand when he read about it. Salem.  


It reminds him of Frances, in the old days; resigned to a fate he didn’t understood. To use, be used. It makes him feel guilty for his feelings, back then, but when he’s said it to her she’s laughed at him and told him he was just a kid, and she was giving him and his friends all drugs, of course he liked her. She’d laughed, and told him if anyone apologizes, it should be Snazz.

He asks her why Snazz, and she laughs at him, harder, but it almost seems like it hurts her.

It’s a bad track of thought. He feels like so many times in his life he’s loved women in ways that destroy them, that takes something, from them, and he can’t recover from this little piece of guilt in his chest, about it, that buries itself in with the little hole in his soul where his mom never liked him. He feels like between chants he can hear the sound of pyrex hitting the pavement, having been thrown from a window and fallen two stories, and he waits to hear his ex-girlfriend screaming at him, too. He finishes his joint, and he rewinds the song. He could never sing something like this, play it, because he’s-- he doesn’t mean anything. He can’t make something that feels like this, to listen to, just by virtue of its being.

Fuck, he wants to play the drums. It’s physical enough, it pulls him up out of his weird think, in the deepest part of the back of his skull where all his bad feelings hang out.

He wonders if he has taken something, from Nathan, and that’s the thought that gets him out of the van, into the cold of the night, because fuck, fuck, he can’t sit around and do this shit to himself, again. There’s nothing to cure the mental sick like walking alone, at night, real fast, smoking your cigarettes in as few breaths as you can manage them. Like you’re meant to be somewhere, meant to do something. Like your sense of purpose is a physical place, and not a little carrot dangling a foot ahead of your stupid little rabbit body, which follows the slightest indication it might experience even momentary pleasure with dogged dedication that you only wish you could match towards, like, money or getting ripped.

It’s so scary, suddenly, because he feels like all that is moving his life forward right now is Nathan Explosion, and now when he isn’t around him he just feels fucking  _ restless _ . Like there’s something he’s meant to be doing, needs to be doing, and every second he isn’t spending at his drum kit is wasted time.

_ You’re lucky _ , Frances had told him, once, when she still wore dresses, when Pickles wore eyeliner.  _ Not all of us are born, set out with shit to do. _

_ * * * * * _

It’s late, too late, for him to be at Nathan’s apartment. He knows that, for sure-- because a lot of the other apartments in the building have their lights out, and the Chinese place down the street is closed. The cold of the night presses into his skin, even through the leather of his jacket. He doesn’t care. He’s got a half a bowl of weed and two nibs of whiskey holding him down, and he’s still so restless to make something his hands are shaking. He buzzes Nathan’s apartment a third time, longer, holds the button down in a way that he knows is particularly fucking annoying. He has two more minutes of waiting and incessant button-pressing before someone finally comes on the intercom.

“Sandra moved out, stop trying,” announces a grainy male voice that isn’t Nathan Explosion.

“‘M here for Nathan.”

“Nathan moved out, stop trying,” says the increasingly tired man in the buzzer.  _ Lies _ the increasingly tired man in the buzzer. Pickles scoffs, and buzzes again.

“If you want to go back to sleep, ping me in, dude, let me find out on my own.”

Thankfully, mercifully, there’s a loud noise like an electric toothbrush dropped, on,  _ into _ a porcelain sink, and Pickles is headed up six flights of stairs.  _ He’d been looking for something physical.  _ It feels like a warmup for his drum kit, even if he cannot possibly play at this hour, even if his kit is in a storage unit on the other side of the city. His heart beats in his throat, throbs, infected with what he’s going to be able to get up to. It reminds him of the early days, with Snakes and Barrels; when the rest of them stunk like kitty litter, and they’d lay around Tony’s living room and smile, lazy, like their mouths were sliding off. And Pickles, seventeen, would animatedly describe bridges and verses and choruses, progressions, all of it, to them, in these incomprehensible and out of tune tirades that couldn’t more excite him if he was on coke. He’d lost that, somewhere, along the way. Like a thread out in the wind he didn’t know he was holding until it blew out of his hands, and then he got into a death metal band and hung out with his pot dealer and listened to a Yoko Ono tape and it all came back to him.

Random, in the wind.

Nathan Explosion is not as excited to see Pickles as Pickles is to see him. He leans against the doorjamb like he will fall down, otherwise. His breath smells like vomit (and a little like blood.)

“I want to write a song,” Pickles tells him. “So write one,” Nathan says back, spits back, like it will evaporate Pickles from this plane of existence.

“I want to write a song  _ with you _ , dude, come on, I’m fuckin’-- I’m jumpin’ out of my skin.”

Nathan isn’t excited, just yet-- that’s fine, that’s A-Ok, alright? That’s cool, because Nathan is the person who gets the music, who understands the vision, and if it’s meant to be-- and God, fuck, it has to be-- he’ll get this. 

“Should I make coffee?” Nathan asks him, wary, his eyelids double thick as he looks back at Pickles, behind him, and Pickles tells him, “Sure,” and Nathan’s whole face is green and hard like he’s an overgrown pistachio about it but he puts a kettle on the stove before leading him around to the other side of his kitchen island, where the living room rests. The couch, a picked at, beat-up black leather, slouches in the center as though just one more ass will crack it in half. Pickles flops down like he really intends to be that very ass.

Pickles asks Nathan for a notebook, and Nathan moves like a continent drifting towards a reluctant pangea to go get it. He sits down, and he scratches his calf, and Pickles notices for the first time that Nathan doesn’t have any leg hair, really. That he’s wearing his skivvies, too, and he wants to snort at him and poke fun at him, but Nathan’s already dog tired and Pickles is about to make him listen to part of a Yoko Ono tape. Pickles offers him the great mercy of keeping his mouth closed as he puts the tape in the deck on the coffee table, turning the volume to a number that sits right in Pickles’ skull and skipping a few minutes into the right track. The bongos open, and that same cloying, insistent voice pours out, and Pickles didn’t explain that this was not going to be a heavy metal tape and so Nathan sighs all heavily and digs the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

Pickles tells him, “Fuck you, listen--” and Nathan shakes his head, because he’s a brat, inside, he’s a two hundred pounds of angry meat wrapped around a 10 pound fucking petulant brat, but it’s Pickles, doing this to him, and so he listens. And Pickles is glad, glad, and he tries hard not to press any other meaning to it.

They get through the beginning. Nathan puts his hands down, from his big, fat head, and rests his forearms across his bare knees. He watches the wall, while he listens, and Pickles would pay money to peer into the back of his head.  _ Fuck _ , something is wrong with him, for that, and he’s going to critique it when--

__ _ Oh, why! Oh, why! Oh, why? _

_ Oh, why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? _

Nathan looks at Pickles, like he does, like he has, when Pickles finds a needle. Everything with him is like that, every conversation, he just dumps a bucket of hay into Pickles’ lap and he doesn’t ask him to find the scrap of silver, in it, he expects him to already know where it is, and he leaves Pickles uneasy and then leaves him rewarded.

_ Help! Help! Help! Help! _

_ Help! Help! Help! Help! _

He’s smiling, he’s smiling. Pickles can see his sharp little canine teeth, like Nathan is a primitive creature made to eat things, like he’s hungry for what Pickles has brought into his apartment.

_ Must kill, must hang, must kill, must hang _

_ Must kill, must hang, must kill, must hang _

_ Must kill, must hang, must kill, must hang _

_ Must kill, must hang _

“Fucking whose tape is this?”

“Yoko Ono?”

And Nathan is cackling. Pickles doesn’t think he’s heard him laugh, that hard, about anything before. Not sober, at least, as he is. His eyes are dark and wild, and his shoulders are quaking, still, as he starts to jot some things down in the notebook he’d been so reluctant.

“What made you think of this? You just-- do you just listen to chick songs, like this?” Nathan asks him, and Pickles scoffs, and he tells him, “It’s a gift from my weed dealer.” Nathan doesn’t look up from his writing, retorts, “He couldn’t just give you  _ weed _ ?” and Pickles scoffs back, at him, but he waits too long to tell him about Frances.

He doesn’t know why he takes too long to tell him about Frances. He’d busted into Frances’ apartment, practically, to tell her about Nathan. He isn’t sure what’s different.

“I want to use the, uh-- the gallop, of the chant, I want to use it as the fuckin’ rhythm guitar, okay? I think if we layer it with the melody of the--”

“Lead guitar, yeah. No, I get you. Like a cover.”

“Like a  _ tribute _ , dude. In this one, you’re the fuckin’ devil.”

Nathan looks up, then, finally, finally, and his eyes are glowing, almost, he’s so excited. He pins Pickles to the couch, just like Frances, does, but this time instead of just scared, like he’s before some hungry predator which might just demolish him, he’s certain, certain, that Nathan would do it for fun. Pickles feels like he’s in some living room with a lion. 

“I’m the fucking  _ devil _ ” Nathan echoes, and then looks back down so he can scribble it down. “So I’m talking to Sally, for it?”

“No, dude-- Sally’s the victim, still, for it. You’re talkin’ to the dudes, right? The fuckin’-- the pure dudes. You’re the devil, and you’re tellin’ em they must kill, must hang. That’s the heavy part.”

That’s the part that will ensure Frances won’t strangle him with his own shitty hair for ripping off a Yoko Ono song and reducing it into pop culture garbage.

Nathan’s nodding fast enough that his hair falls off of his shoulder, and he’s writing even more furiously. He's more alive than Pickles has seen him; fighting or drinking, anything.  


“I’m thinkin’, uh-- theatrical, you know? We’re all guys, so we can sing the part of the rest of them. The guys. The chorus can be sang straight, and then during all the bridges you’re growling at them, so we can-- the guitar is Sally.”

“The  _ guitar  _ is Sally.” Nathan echoes.

It’s dawn, when they’re done-- Pickles closing some final notes on a guitar Magnus has left at Nathan’s place. He doesn’t have to play out the basslines, because they’re hardly anything-- he can see them, hear them, in his head, he doesn’t have to play them out to prove them to Nathan and make sure they work. All of this is like riding a bike, just now he has a bike, and the basslines are remembering to remember to keep your head attached to your body.  


His heart, finally, finally, settles into a normal rhythm. He isn’t restless, anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, like me, you must love Metalocalypse but for the sore lack of lesbians. Well, here you go.


	3. Black Sheep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is really edgy, there's a lot of nasty shit in there. Watch out, kids.

Will takes a drag on Pickles’ joint, and then puts his entire head out the window to blow the smoke. Pickles wishes Nathan were in the kitchen with them, so that he could hit him on the arm and point at their smaller, dumber, nicer version of Magnus and his antics, and they could laugh at him before he pulls his head back into the apartment. Instead, Murderface comes back, and just hands Pickles his joint back, so that Pickles can take a pull. Pickles blows his smoke directly into Will’s face for his trouble.

“So-- you don’t think it’s gonna blow, right?”

“No, dude, I think it’ll be fine.”

Will kicks his feet, a little, and makes himself jump when they hit the front of the cabinet he and Pickles are sitting on, at either side of the sink, so they have somewhere to ash. He’s careful to miss the milkshakes they have each put an ungodly amount of bourbon into.

“I just know-- you know-- I got a, uh.  _ Special opportunity _ on my hands, here, right? I’ve never-- with--  _ you know. _ ”

Pickles knows Murderface probably means to say he hasn’t been on a date before, but the fact that he is a giant, weird virgin oozes out of his pores like sweat, and Pickles is certain without a doubt that that must be his real, underlying worry.

“Just-- remember, okay? Go slow. When you go real slow, you know-- you still gotta drive the car, but she’s safe to hop off if she wants.”

“Magnus--”

“I know what Magnus says, dude, but he’s-- you’re not askin’ her to cry on command and piss in your mouth, okay? Don’t listen to him.”

Murderface presses his thin little lips together, and nods, taking the joint back from Pickles, and taking a drag. He leans his head all of the way out the window, again, to exhale, because apparently he has been doing this as a habit and not just the one time, and Pickles does not have the heart to laugh at him out loud about it. He presses his lips together and watches Will resettle himself on the counter, remembering with a small start to hand the joint back to Pickles after he’s looked pensively into the grout and crossed his little chicken legs. Pickles is taking his hit when Murderface starts looking at him real hard.  


“You were famous, right?”

“Yeah.”

Murderface nods, as though this is vital information he’s just successfully verified and not a fact he’s definitely known since their first meeting. Magnus Hammersmith is physically unable to stop mocking Pickles for having worn lipstick and posed in chaps on magazine covers, because it makes him feel good, being older and less successful. It’s something he’d been hoping to leave behind, hopping bands.

He’s never so lucky.

“So you’ve definitely kissed way more girls, right?”

Pickles snorts, and hands Will the joint to finish off. Will struggles, holding it like a fucking cartoon character would because he has not burned himself with it yet and he seems to be more scared of that than he really should have to be. 

“Yeah, I kissed a lot. I’m a real pro, dude.”

“Okay, so--” Murderface yips and drops the dead joint into the sink. He smiles when he looks at his thumb, seeing obviously it is still there, unmangled. It’s like watching a dog, sometimes.

“So?”

“Right, so-- I just go, ‘hey, can we kiss?’ and then she just lets me?”

Pickles pulls a cigarette out from behind his ear. A couple of crumbly tobacco bits fall out and pepper the parts of his ugly mullet, where the free hairs brush back in a cowlick towards the back of his skull. He doesn’t notice. He glances at the door, quick, and then lights up.

“I mean-- you  _ can _ , but I wouldn’t recommend it unless she’s the real dominant type, you know? Some girls think it’s cute if you’re gettin’ lost with ‘em. Don’t like you forward, at all.”

Will nods sagely, as though it makes perfect sense to him, and Pickles lets him play pretend for a few seconds while he takes a drag and actually blows it out the window, ashing it into the sink.

“So-- at the end of the date, okay? When you’re drivin’ her home, put that shit in park and take off your seatbelt, keep the radio on, just let things settle. Try and talk a little, first, get the nerves down, or whatever.”

“And then I just go ‘hey can we kiss’?”

Pickles scoffs. “And then you kinda lean over the gear shifter, yeah? And you get real close, like so close you can’t tell her eyes apart and tryin’ makes your head hurt, and then you say real soft--”

“Hey can we kiss?”

“Yeah. And then probably she’ll just kiss you.”

Pickles is pretty worried his cigarette smoke is going to set off the alarm, this time, even as he’s blowing the smoke out the window, so he holds his hand out the window when he’s not taking puffs. Maybe he’s just as silly as Will is, sometimes.

Will scoots off of the countertop, and goes into the unplugged microwave for the cheese curds they picked up at the Dairy Queen on the way back into the city. Will and Pickles, both of them are from small towns, and Pickles thinks their love of fried cheese is probably the only thing that makes them deem eachother tolerable. Pickles grabs some, leaving his smoke balanced on the window sill, and after feeling them melt in his mouth he picks it back up. He sees grease stains, on the paper filter.

Will says something actually funny, to him, and he laughs.

* * * *

  
  


Nathan comes home, in a hurry. He’s got this big, puffy jacket on, and it’s always funny, seeing him in it, because he looks like a cartoon superhero or The Rock with it on. His nose is stained red from cold, and his face falls, his eyebrows bending in the middle like a pencil that’s just been broken, when he discovers Pickles and Murderface have let all the cold into his place so they could smoke. He comes up between them to pull the glass down.

“Jesus  _ Christ _ , you  _ assholes,  _ it’s fucking thirty degrees out there!”

Pickles tries to muster an appropriate response, but he’s fallen into a hole, he’s so cross faded, and it’s like he’s a little alien from men in black piloting a robot suit that is currently turned off, and as many times as he tries to slam the excuse button all he can muster is a sheepish smile. Will, for his part, is asleep on the floor.

Nathan kicks him. It’s not particularly hard, but whereas other people have bodies of cemented calcium and tendons and shit, William Murderface is built out of hollow toothpicks and construction paper. He rolls onto his side, groaning about how it is freezing.

Pickles breathes out hard through his nose, and lets his head roll a little. Come to think of it, he is a little chilly, even with his jacket on. He pushes against the counter behind himself, feebly, and the cigarette he’d finished while blacking out rolls out of his lap. Nathan picks it up from the floor and leaves it in his garbage disposal.

Nathan tells him, “No, fuck, just hold on,” and he takes his jacket off. It looks like Will is first, getting help, and Nathan grabs him by the arms. Will stirs, when Nathan lifts him, twisting a little in his grip like a little kid.

“Fuck, goddamn--” Nathan offers, and Pickles lurches forward to see what it is (vomit, it’s a bunch of dried up vomit) and Nathan tells him “No!” really hard.

Pickles isn’t sure what he’s been shouted at, for, and he bobs his head a bit, swaying as he looks at Nathan, who holds skinny little Willy Murderface like he’s a sack of potatoes. There’s something weird, in Nathan’s face, and Pickles can’t place it at all. Like Nathan’s afraid of him, a little, but Nathan’s the biggest toughest guy, and he’s never fallen for Pickles’ shit.

“You could k-- you could kill me, dude.” Pickles offers, his voice lilted.

Nathan knits up his face, more, and leans forward slightly. It is absurd to Pickles that apparently holding Will up in midair is the same thing for Nathan as holding a laundry basket.

“Nooooo, no, like-- I’d let you. Like. Kill me, I ain’t got-- no chooooice.”

Nathan seems to decide that he’s not going to decipher what Pickles means, and that he’s tired of trying, because he lets out a terse sigh and carries his sack of bassist over to his couch. He sets Will up on his side, and puts a blanket on over him. Pickles goes to lean back against the wall again, but he goes too fast and smacks his head hard against the wall. Nathan jumps a little, and Pickles sees too many stars to know any more than that. He squeezes his eyes shut, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. He breathes for a few seconds as dampened pain radiates out from the back of his head, and when there’s a big wide hand on his upper bicep he jumps and looks up, suddenly. Nathan is so close to him it surprises him, and he jerks his head back a second time out of instinct, and he smacks his head on the wall again.

He shouts, “Oof, fuck!!” into Nathan’s face and Nathan laughs at him. Pickles is good-natured, when he’s crossfaded, and even though he doesn’t really get why Nathan is laughing, Pickles chortles along with him.

Nathan asks him something, and Pickles is too busy looking at a hair on Nathan’s cheek that he must have missed shaving for weeks now, it’s like as long as the width of his thumb, probably. Pickles refocuses his eyes on Nathan’s with some pretty significant effort.

“What?”

“I said, do you still want to let me kill you?”

His voice is all low, and he’s smiling, and something about the whole fucking.. Thing... gets Pickles snickering again. Pickles presses the back of his hand to his mouth and snorts, loud.

“I could, uh-- I’ve got some knives, you know.”

“Ooh, you got some knives?”

“Yeah, like-- kitchen knives. Cut you up, or whatever.”

Pickles shakes his head.

“Oh, no?”

“Messy.”

Nathan snorts and asks him, ‘what’? And Pickles puts his hand back down so he can tell him, “‘S messy.”

“Well, fuck, I didn’t think of that.”

“Ah yeah, dude, you gotta-- when you’re killin’ somebody, you gotta think like that.”

Pickles isn’t sure when exactly Nathan leaned into him, like this, but he parts his legs slightly as a part of his own natural shifting around and he feels Nathan’s thumbs on the countertops on either side of his legs. He’s nervous, looking down at them, nervous he’s going to have to deal with a situation of some kind, nervous he’ll deal with it  _ wrong _ , and then Nathan tells him, “Hey,” and Pickles looks back up at him again, suddenly.

“What if I shot you?”

Pickles knits his eyebrows together, and leans back again. Nathan catches one of his arms so that he doesn’t smack his head again, and then resettles himself, leaning against the sink on one hip.

“You shoot me?”

Nathan nods, and then seems to notice the third of the way full bottle of bourbon in the sink, so he picks it up and starts drinking. Pickles sees him wince after taking it down, and it makes him smile, a little, remembering Nathan’s still basically a kid, no matter how many times Pickles has seen him physically throw an adult man.

“Yeah, you got a gun, right? In your van? You give me the keys, I’ll go get it. That’s, uh-- big mess too, though, huh?”

“Pff. Brains, all over. Wapow.”

Nathan snorts, again. He takes another drink, a longer one, and he shakes his arms and his shoulders as the wince wracks him.

“Wapow,” Nathan offers, mirthlessly. He glances at something in the living room-- Pickles doesn’t know, but it’s a clock-- and then he looks at Pickles again.

“Are you staying over?”

Pickles raises his eyebrows, and leans his head to the side. In doing so, he catches sight of Murderface sprawled out on the sofa he might usually take, and then he sighs.

“I would, but he’s-- Couch ain’t free.”

Nathan nods, letting out a breath of his own as he caps up the bourbon and looks out at the vomit-crusty kid he’s taking charge of for the evening. It’s quiet, a couple more beats, and Pickles figures Nathan intends to help Pickles down six flights of stairs so that he can sleep in his cold as ice van.

“You can share my bed, if you aren’t going to be, like. Fucking weird, about it.”

Pickles pricks his eyebrows up, and wags his head in an exaggerated nod. He doesn’t know he’s being silly.

“And no pissing.”

“Yeah, no pissing.”

“Or barfing.”

“No barfin’, dude, fingers crossed. I wouldn’t fuckin’ throw up in your bed, no way, no how.”

This is a lie. Pickles would definitely throw up in Nathan’s bed. He also would probably through up twice, minimum, on the stairs down to his van, and then throw up in his van. Leveraging his options, it seems better to lean over the side of Nathan’s mattress on the floor and aim for a grocery bag through the night than leave multiple locations for Nathan to have to mop, and barf to freeze in his own bed.

He smiles in the hopes that Nathan can’t read his mind on what he’s thinking. Nathan takes a few seconds, and he rolls his eyes, and then he pulls Pickles off of the counter by the arm. Pickles is wobbly, leaning on the counter until he can get to his sea legs. One of his feet is asleep. He pulls his nose, and then looks up at Nate and offers him a hard nod.

Nathan, apparently unconvinced by Pickles’ very certain and capable nodding abilities, grabs him by the arm again, and helps him in a wide circle around the barf Will had left in the kitchen, and then into the previously forbidden realm of Nathan Explosion’s bedroom.

It’s clean, which is surprising. There are band posters everywhere like there are in the living room. The room is so small that he can only really fit a small bookshelf, which holds mostly shoeboxes full of folded clothing, and his mattress, which touches the walls on three sides. Pickles steps forward and moves to flop down, and Nathan catches his arm.

Pickles raises his eyebrows, at Nathan, his head swimming and unsure of what the issue is. Nathan sighs, and starts working Pickles’ jacket off of his body. Pickles takes the hint, and makes quick work of his sneakers after. Bending over makes him lose his balance, and he stumbles back to lean his ass on the wall and finish removing them.

Nathan undresses, in front of him, and Pickles doesn’t stare at him because he is very practiced at not staring at Nathan while he changes. Pickles isn’t sure how long he’ll be, and all he can hear is his own heartbeat in his ears, so he looks straight down at the floor and leans on his knees until he’s told he can go the hell to sleep.

Nathan laughs at him, because he catches him, standing funny like that. When Nathan speaks, it feels strange-- like someone is going to catch the both of them, getting ready to sleep in the same bed.

“I don’t have anything that will fit you, I think.”

“‘S cool,” Pickles offers. He breathes out, heavy. He keeps his eyes on the floor, because suddenly he’s dizzy.

“You’re covered in booze and melted cheese, so--”

“I ain’t takin’ my clothes off.”

It’s quiet, a little while. Maybe this is what Nathan meant, about being weird to sleep in the same bed. Nathan lets out a sharp noise from his nose. Pickles finally looks at him.

Nathan looks all... guilty.

“No, look, it ain’t like that, okay, it ain’t like that. God, fuck. Uh.” Pickles makes a weird little grunt, and starts fumbling with his belt.

“You got a spare shirt, or somethin’? Don’t care if it ain’t-- ‘s cool if it ain’t fit.”

Nathan nods, at him. Pickles ends up with a bright yellow shirt. He’s usually a small, and it fits like a large. It isn’t the worst thing. He looks down, and the upside down letters spell out ‘Port New Richey Parish of the Holy Mother Vacation Bible Camp’. He snorts.

“You a... god guy?”

“No.”

Nathan is wearing long johns. They look funny as hell on him. Pickles laughs at him, and then finally collapses on top of Nathan’s comforter, where he worms himself underneath. And it’s nice-- he’s not slept inside and in a real bed, not for a while, and it feels like this unbidden luxury that he should cherish. Nathan dips the mattress, as he climbs in, but it’s a king and has plenty of room really for both of them.

Especially considering Pickles has pretty much wedged himself in the crack between the mattress and the wall, so his back is protected and he can look out at the side of Nathan’s head. Nathan settles down, quick. He sleeps like a grandmother or a corpse, on his back, with his hands clasped over his stomach. The darkness dances across his pallid cheeks.

“Nate?”

He presses his eyes closed, tenses his lids, where they were relaxed prior. He breathes out somewhat frustratedly. Pickles gives it a few seconds, maybe twenty, before he decides to barrel along ahead even though Nathan has not verbally acknowledged him.

“I’m sorry about-- I’m sorry for, uh. When Ronnie put her tits out the window.”

Nathan scoffs, then, and without opening his eyes asks him, “What?”

“You got all sad, that time, and I’m-- it made me all sad, you know? That you had to be sad, for Ronnie’s boobies.”

“Uh-- Thanks,” Nathan tells him, and Pickles tells him, “Sorry,” again.

The silence settles in, and it feels like forever, that time, and then Nathan turns over on his side so he can look at Pickles more directly. Pickles can’t quite make out the expression on his face, and it makes him somewhat sheepish.

“Magnus, uh-- he told me. Some stuff. About you.”

Pickles has a turn to scoff, and he looks at Nathan’s neck, in the dark. He’s almost certain that he knows what Magnus would have told him, and why, and it makes Nathan’s face too scary to consider.

“What kind of stuff?”

The alcohol is still swimming in Pickles’ face, and he knows it’s warm from that and not because he’s actually flushed, but he wishes he was drunk enough that everything was numb.

“About, uh.... Your...”

Pickles doesn’t know if Nathan means your or you’re or yore or what. He takes his turn to press his eyes closed. Fuck.  _ Fuck _ . He hadn’t wanted Nathan to know, maybe ever. He’d wanted to just kind of... move to this new city, and forget who he used to be, and just kind of bask in being able to be whoever he said he was. That had been the fun part, of being in Los Angeles the first time, of being in Snakes n Barrels. He’d just fucked it up with all the heroin.

But Magnus Hammersmith-- Magnus Hammersmith knows that Pickles has a brand right between his legs that tells anyone who sees it about his suffering, about his past. Pickles doesn’t know how he knew, but he remembers, one night. He remembers he and Magnus sat on Magnus’ couch, watching a scary movie, just like Pickles has done a hundred times with Nathan. Except Magnus likes to talk all low and near his face, and Magnus told him ‘I know you’ve got a pussy,’ like it was a pick up line, but it wasn’t a pick up line-- it was just some weird goddamn power grab. As though that changes anything.

Pickles worried, a long time, that it changed something. Pickles draws his legs up, under the covers, curls up real tight.

“So?” Pickles asks him, and he waits for it. He isn’t sure what  _ it  _ will be, but he’s almost certain it’ll be difficult and terrible.

“So, uh-- I know. So, like-- if you-- if there’s trouble, or you need anything.”

Pickles opens his eyes, again. He looks at Nathan, he scoffs at Nathan.

“Two weeks ago you--  _ are you a homo _ ? And now you’re fuckin’-- dude, shut the fuck up. God.”

Nathan breathes out through his nose, again, and he looks at the wall past Pickles’ head.

“I said it was fine if you were.”

“Bein’-- the way I am, that ain’t the same as bein’ a homo, okay, there’s-- I’m glad you’re fine. I hate this conversation, dude.”

“Oh.” Nathan offers, and Pickles wishes it was a ‘sorry’, but even he can’t get his hopes that high. It’s quiet another couple of seconds. Pickles is stewing. The whole thing is making him mad, but at least he doesn’t have to panic.

The air, in Nathan’s bedroom, is cold. Pickles likes it, warm, likes it warm like it was in Los Angeles and how it is in the summer and the spring in Florida. This is his second winter, with storms ripped from hell and these little cold fronts that didn’t freeze him out, but that reminded him a night or two of what it was like in that hell hole of small town Wisconsin, where it would hit negative ten just as a curse from God himself in Pickles’ direction, on account of him being a degenerate, and all. It’ll probably be fifty or sixty, tomorrow, all day, nice, easy.

Probably everything will be easier, tomorrow.

“Tell me a secret,” Pickles tells him. Nathan knits his eyebrows up, again, letting his eyes crack open once more, and Pickles sighs like he’s explaining not to run into walls for fun.

“I’m fuckin’-- I’m mad as hell, you know a fuckin’-- big secret-- ‘bout me, tell me one about you so it’s. I wanna be even.”

Nathan breathes out his nose, and shifts. “Okay, uh-- like what?”

Pickles shrugs, and it’s completely unintelligible to Nathan in the dark and laying down, like he is.

“Fuckin’-- are you a homo? You do a hit and run some time? Somethin’ like that, dude.”

Nathan is quiet a really long time. It’s an extremely suspicious amount of time. At first, Pickles thinks probably it has to be that Nathan can’t think of anything, because he’s this big dumb oaf who has never done any wrong. He breathes out, after a while.

“Okay, so-- but you can’t make fun of me, Pickles. Like if I tell you this, you aren’t allowed to make fun of me.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Nathan breathes out, hard, all uneasy, and he drops his voice lower. Pickles can hardly hear him, when he speaks up again, but Pickles doesn’t think he’ll repeat himself if asked. His cheeks look darker, but Pickles can’t be certain in the faint moonlight streaming in from the small window roughly the size of a shoebox up above them.

“Okay, so-- when I was in high school, I was on the football team, right?”

“That’s not embarrassing, but okay.”

“No, and, like-- I was dating Ronnie, and she’s all... she always liked to make me feel bad, or whatever.”

“Okay.”

“And once she told me she’d suck me off, but I had to put my jock strap, like-- on me. On my face.”

“Oh no.”

“Yeah, and like-- it was a really good blow job, right? I didn’t ever have a good blow job before, usually she’d just give up.”

_ “Oh no. _ ”

“And now I really like, like-- body odor, or whatever.”

“Nathan, dude.”

“I know.”

“Dude, I don’t think you do. Fuck, that’s so much worse than mine. Your own jock strap?”

Pickles snickers a little, and punches Nathan on the arm, gentle, for looking too embarrassed as he nods at him. Big guys like him, they shouldn’t get sheepish, like that.

“But you didn’t keep doing it after you broke up, right?”

“Daria lets me smell her armpits after she works out. Or, uh-- oh, fuck, when I go down on her?”

Pickles thought Daria was a  _ nice girl _ . She’s 5’10, so she isn’t totally dwarfed by Nathan, and they had all these cute gym dates together where Pickles had thought they were just, like, bonding, and now the whole thing is tainted.

“ _ No. _ Dude. Fuck. Oh, god, I think-- you know Magnus is into pee, right? Like he’s just straight up into pee, right?”

“He is?”

“Yeah, but  _ armpits _ might be like the same level. Like, what, you guys-- you get done spottin’ each other, and then climb in the civic together and just hotbox yourselves in with all your own sweat?”

Nathan breathes out, and flops back down on his back. Pickles is getting the idea that maybe he shouldn’t be going in so hard. He presses his lips together a second, and realizes maybe, hey, he could reveal a secret too, right? Like a less secret one, that would put his thing on par with Nathan’s thing.

“I, uh-- one time I threw up on a dick.”

Nathan lets out a completely incredulous noise, and Pickles tells him, “No, no, dude-- okay, I was like sixteen, right? I was just like, livin’ as a little twink or whatever, sunset boulevard, glam rock, all that, and I was gettin’ high with my buddy Tommy Lopez and his girl, Astrid. And she was weird, she always wanted to see guys doin’ it, you know?”

“So she made you throw up on him?”

“No, uh-- I had sucked a dick before, whatever, but like-- I was used to little dicks, you know? Home town Tomahawk, Wisconsin cock, okay, I wasn’t-- Tommy Lopez was hung, alright, and I just went to swallow it down.”

“And then you threw up?”

“No, uh-- I was slurpin’ or whatever, and she was into it, Astrid, you know she was hot as fuck. Swedish, like actually Swedish, I would have jumped off a bridge to see her tits, alright, she was so fuckin’ hot. And she’s all, like, into it, pushin’ my head down while I’m blowin’ Tommy, but they’re both high and makin’ out, okay? And then she holds my head down too long, and I choke, and they just don’t notice.”

“And then you threw up with his dick like... in your mouth?”

“Yeah, and then I threw up with his dick in my mouth. It was weird, too, like-- viscous. No chunks, or nothin’, but it sure smelled like hell.”

Nathan scoffs, and looks at him again. “Ronnie threw up on my dick once.”

Pickles snorts. “Yeah?” and Nathan tells him, smiling, “Yeah. Smelled like hell.”

* * * *

The piss that Pickles takes, that morning, is legendary. Is thunderous. If Magnus Hammersmith was there, he might clap his hands and whistle. Luckily, though, for many reasons, Magnus Hammersmith is not, in fact, there, and instead it is just Pickles, and the cool air, and the cigarette he is ashing on the windowsill. Afterwards, he flushes the toilet, and hops right into a shower so hot it stains his skin red, and burns his throat, a little, as he drinks it down from the faucet like a dog. It’s a real Pickles Miller morning.

When he leaves the bathroom, Nathan’s vacation bible school shirt like a jumper down to his mid-thighs and his jeans and shirt rolling around in the washing machine that is inexplicably in between the toilet and miniature shower, he discovers Murderface face down on the couch and audibly groaning. Like a baby, calling for help and crying, but on the lowest register of his actually rather deep voice.

Pickles hangs himself by one arm from the doorway back into Nathan’s room to ask him, where he lays in bed, “You got any gatorade?”

Nathan grunts, and turns over in bed, intent to sleep until the later hours of the day. It seems affirmative. Pickles takes apart some of the cupboards before he finds it, but it’s there. He  _ would _ make Murderface some breakfast, but Nathan banned him from cooking in the apartment for trying once to make a kind of desert spaghetti. He brings it to Murderface, who covers his eyes with one paddle hand and downs it with the other. His hair is tangled, a bit, but is curlier now that it is dry and has some oil from his scalp. Pickles would tell him it looks nice, but Murderface takes compliments like Pickles takes... prayers.

“You’re gonna need a shower, dude. C’mon, upsy daisy.”

Pickles gets him into the bathroom. What he does from there is his business. He does hear Will announce to himself, audibly, ‘it’s pee pee time’ so at least his spirits have improved?

By the time Nathan is up and about, Pickles has been awkwardly moving around his apartment in daylight hours during which it is generally vacated for long enough that he’s located a bong and gotten started on the rest of the weed he’d brought up. He’s found Alien playing on one of the local stations, and he’s taken to lusting over Sigourney Weaver in a utility suit with a gun while he takes rips of his weed in Nathan’s bong. His hair is almost dry, but he’s not styled it, and so the cowlick where his hair has started to recede, on the left side, leaves it parted and wild. Nathan seems surprised, somewhat, to have caught him still over. When Murderface comes barrelling out of the bathroom and hits him with the door, wearing an extremely large robe that is clearly Nathan’s, Nathan seems surprised and now extremely displeased that they are both still over.

Pickles pulls his nose, and tilts the mouth of the bong in his direction. Nathan rushes across the apartment and utters an “Oh, fuck yeah” as he holds Pickles’ zippo to the bowl, and draws a fat hit up through the chamber. His eyes flutter a little as he holds it, and lets it out on his breath. Pickles offers him praise, “Sick!” and a high five for holding in a massive rip without coughing.

Nathan sits down on the couch, collapses, on the couch, splaying all his limbs out over his half like a starfish or a stuffed animal. He keeps his eyes closed, a couple of seconds, and when he opens them again his lids are heavy. Will joins them, crosslegged on the floor. The robe is parted over his legs from how he is sitting and he does not seem to notice that pretty much his entire cock and balls are just out, loose, in a way that is extremely bothersome and strange.

“Can I take a hit?” He asks Pickles, who has repossessed the bong.

“Can you put on some underpants?” Pickles counters.

Unfortunately he has learned better, of Murderface, than to expect him to have any shame left for normal things after he’s gone and used it up about his skull shape and his lack of prowess in securing sexual encounters. Murderface attempts to take as big a rip as Nathan had taken, and immediately starts coughing, disturbing the bong water considerably.

He sounds like he might actually be dying. He keeps trying to stop the hacking, and he keeps saying “sorry” as though Pickles and Nathan will be mad at him for failing to take a smooth rip. Pickles tells him “Just breathe!” between snickers at him.

Pickles can tell that Will is fucking smacked. He stops responding, and just sits there, holding his throat and coughing. He stands up, leaning on the coffee table, coughing. He goes into the bathroom to have some water, seemingly having forgotten there is anyone else in the apartment, and just starts downing water from the faucet. Pickles takes another rip of his own, and then puts the bong down on the coffee table for Nathan once he feels ready.

Pickles glances at Nathan, to make fun of Murderface, but Nathan appears to have refocused himself on the TV. Pickles knows Alien is one of his favorite movies. The Spanish subtitles add some flair.

Murderface lays face down on the floor in the living room. Every time Pickles asks him if he’s doing alright, Murderface just keeps saying “I’m fine.” and then hissing he is going to die under his breath as though Pickles cannot hear him. He watches Murderface run his hands over the carpet and just breathe, for a while. The body high is hitting Pickles nicely, just as it had the night before, and it settles deep into him like his bones are lead and helium at once, and there is no pain or anguish, and time is still and normal. The universe, in that moment, seems kind. He imagines Will might feel the same way, just also overwhelmed and with a burnt out back of his throat.

After Alien ends, they change the channel and watch some Jerry Springer. There are several points where naked breasts are exposed on the tube, and Nathan and Pickles take turns saying “nice.” Murderface turns over, on his back, and Pickles watches him blink blearily at the ceiling. Nathan seems to have caught it, too, because he offers a snort.

“You, uh-- you really shouldn’t let him get high, like that.”

Pickles lets his eyes slide over to the Nathan reflected on the television screen. He sees Nathan looking at the side of his head. He’s happy for his choice, a lot of the time if he looks back at Nathan, head on, Nathan will slip out of it and look away. He embarrasses easily.

“Why, dude?”

“He’s sixteen.”

“What the fuck do you mean he’s sixteen? He has a fuckin’--”

Nathan laughs a little, and then gets up, stepping over the child Pickles has apparently been smoking out for weeks now. Fuck, no wonder Will likes hanging around him so much.

“You, uh-- are you sure you’re one to talk?”

Pickles wrinkles up his nose, but he takes the red dog that Nathan hands him. There’s some more flavor to the hops than he’s used to, growing up in a Miller Light town. He decides he likes it better. Bread, with his hearty green breakfast. Ha.

“What’s that mean?”

“I mean you were, like, sixteen, right? For Snakes ‘n’ Barrels.”

Pickles raises his eyebrows about to his hairline, and points at Nathan with the tip of his beer can. When Nathan does not have the decency to retract his statement, Pickles realizes he will have to stop scoffing and give his bandmate the benefit of explaining his incredulity.

“And you think I  _ stand by and recommend that experience? _ Dude, I was like-- I should be dead.”

“What?”

“Yeah, no, like-- just the heroin, okay, the  _ amount _ of fuckin’ heroin, all the-- I have ODed six times.”

“Holy shit, uh-- I don’t know, you always talk about it like it’s all cool, or whatever, I didn’t mean to...”

“No, it’s--”

Pickles blows hard out of his nose, and drinks some of his beer, settling into his spot on the couch. He’d been sitting up and bristling like he wanted to argue, and he realized it’s just because he’s uncomfortable.

“Look, like-- I don’t come out to be a big bummer, okay? Just-- we gotta fuckin’ take care of him, okay? Where’s he even sleep?”

“Uh-- I think like-- you know how you and me, with my couch? He’s like that with Magnus and some other guys.”

Pickles raises his eyebrows and breathes out hard.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s gotta fuckin’ have to stop. Okay, so--”

“Pickles, you sleep in a  _ van _ .”

“Yeah, I’m not some sixteen year old douchebag.Alright, can he stay here a while?”

Nathan rolls his head back on the couch, resting it on the back so he’s looking right at the ceiling.

“He won’t stay here. I, uh-- I used to try and get him to stay here, once he knows you know he’s a kid he doesn’t like to hang around as much.”

“Does Magnus know he’s a kid?”

Nathan blows out again, uncomfortable, and shifts around like suddenly none of his clothes fit right. It reminds Pickles a lot of when they’d been in bed together, the night before.

“Probably?”

“Yeah that shit definitely needs to stop  _ right now. _ ”

It’s quiet another few minutes, and the both of them admittedly get distracted looking at some fresh, silicone-inflated titties on the screen. They’re some real bolt ons, some late 80s jobs that can hold up tube tops on their own. Pickles misses seeing them in real life, but he bets Nathan is that age where he’d not seen any until he came to the city at eighteen. Probably for him, it’s a cougar thing. Funny how that works.

“When’s, uh-- when’s your lease up?”

Nathan raises his eyebrows and blows out some air.

“I don’t know, fucking-- February, but do not ask me to get a two bedroom with that shithead.”

“No, no, uh-- maybe like a three bedroom, right? Skwisgaar’s been trying to get a place in Tampa. He can’t fuckin’ take it, in Miami, his spanish is the worst.”

“And what about you?

Pickles snorts, loud, and shrugs.

“I’ll pay for the parking spot.”


	4. Moondance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang all moves in together and drops acid. Secrets are revealed, and there are some more nasty dream sequences. Pickles reunites with an old friend, and decides to make a choice he hadn't the last time around this particular bend.
> 
> Also, a retcon; in Chapter 2 Pickles is hiding something from Frances but I don't specify in the prose what it was. Pickles, before this chapter, is unaware that Magnus is being considered for Dethklok. The thing he is in hiding is going to tie back to something better later on.

It turns out to be easier, finding a place, than Pickles had anticipated. They’d pitched it to Skwisgaar at Nathan’s place. Pickles took his chance to prattle on about shared expenses while Skwisgaar was shut up inhaling a bong rip. Skwisgaar silenced him with the wave of a hand and told him ‘Gods, finally’ around all the smoke whispering out of his strained throat. Skwisgaar tells them he has the security covered. Pickles tells him that’s interesting, considering they don’t know what the security is going to be, yet, and Skwisgaar had rolled his eyes again and said if he can just have some ladies over, it’s covered.

They look at several three-bedroom joints-- Nathan doesn’t want to live in a walk-up, anymore, and so they look at some more that have an elevator. Those are mostly in family buildings, and none of them want to be restrained by children’s bedtimes. A little further into the burbs they manage to secure a place above a closed-down fast food restaurant that only has a couple of bullets lodged into the exterior brick facade. It also manages, in its grand virtue, to rest on the second floor.

Daria helps them move in; she’s like an amazon warrior, pulling plastic bins up the stairs with Nathan and joking with him that she won’t be able to visit him, anymore, now that she won’t get a good workout up all the stairs. The way Nathan smiles at her and laughs at her jokes, it makes Pickles feel good. Feel warm. Like his heart grows three sizes. Like in that fucking Grinch movie, but at least if he were in that Grinch movie he’d be fucking _tall_.

The kitchen has multiple layers of laminate, stacked up so high it’s easy to trip on. Skwisgaar pulls up a peel-and-stick tile falling into the cabinets while he moves in all his liquid yogurt and soy milk. The apartment has one bathroom, and the tub is pink, and the medicine cabinet is full of dead palmetto bugs. Will comes in to watch Pickles clean them all out, to tell him ‘sick’ as each one is handpicked into the garbage. Nathan’s bedroom is bigger than his last one, and he uses the space to put a bench press directly next to his bed. He pairs it with a pullup bar in the archway into the hall even though he is the only one with arms big enough to use it.

Nathan lifts Pickles up and helps him do three baby pullups while all of them laugh about how dumb it is. Pickles thinks a lot about the feeling of Nathan’s thumbs in the soft parts of his abdomen, in the gap between his hip bones and his ribs. He goes to sleep that night in the twin bed they’ve jammed in an inexplicable butler pantry that is included off of the narrow kitchen. He repeatedly reminds himself of how good it felt to see Nathan be happy with Daria, because he knows if he doesn’t he’ll just think about Nathan, and the slideshow of times Nathan has been alone with him. Of those thumbs, in his sides, and that way Nathan looks at him that makes him feel like no one has really looked at him before. And that doesn’t work, so he gets up and gets drunk with Skwisgaar and the four different old women he’s brought over to cover the security deposit.

Things are good-- Will invites his little girlfriend over, and announces to the adult men he calls friends in front of her that they’ve totally kissed. They get to all laugh and stay warm. It feels that way-- warm.

The apartment populates slowly; a glass coffee table that’s only got one chip, that they found generously on the street. A big, only slightly stained shag rug that Skwisgaar stole from someone he spent the night with at a local sorority. Dozens of stupid fucking mugs from the goodwill outlet (Pickles’ has a garfield printed on it and says ‘world’s best granmdpa’ on the side). Things are even better, the first party they throw, the first time they bring all their instruments into the living room and push the furniture against the wall, to show off to all their friends.

Things are perfect, then, actually. When Pickles remembers that the best, every night, for a week as he falls asleep, he feels like maybe it is perfect.

* * * * *

“Okay, but be cool,” Pickles says in something shockingly close to a nagging tone. He ties the bandana a little bit tighter on the back of Will’s head, propping his bangs up. 

“No, you don’t get it-- I _am_ cool already. I’m something of an expert, now, with the, uh-- I’ve done the _adequate research_ , you know.”

Pickles breathes out somewhat uneasily, and leans back against Nathan’s couch. It looks nicer, against the walls pasted with eggshells here rather than against the peeling wallpaper at his old place. He isn’t sure what research Will could have done to prepare himself so confidently to meet Frances and Blair, but he’s certain that unless he means he’s recently gotten through The Second Sex, it will not be pleasant to ask him about it.

Or-- fuck, to have William Murderface explain De Beauvoir to him? That might be actual torture.

“No, dude, just-- don’t bring it up, okay? They’re just two dudes, to you. Just treat ‘em like you treat dudes. We’re gonna do a bunch of acid, and you an’ Fran are gonna babysit, and you’re just gonna be a fuckin’ good boy.”

Will kicks his legs out a bit, and yelps when he accidentally kicks the leg of their coffee table, rattling all of the half-finished beers sitting on top of it. The sound is almost as grating as Will’s whine when he speaks again.

“Man, fuck _that_ , these are-- these are real life _lesbians_ , Pickles. I gotta-- if I don’t shoot my shot on this, I’m never gonna be able to make Chelsea nut.”

The noise that Pickles makes, at that, is not describable using any human language. He presses his fingers into his eyebrows because, holy fuck, oh shit, that is the worst thing he’s ever heard, and he has to make sure Will has not just completely ripped them off with that phraseage alone. Maybe this is Frances’ problem after all. Maybe he should just fucking... let Frances eviscerate him.

Oh, god, but the complaining he will have to contend with, then.

“No, dude, _no_. You’re not gonna say the word nut, okay? Like, I don’t even want you to offer ‘em skippy. You’re banned.”

“What? From making my _girlfriend nut?_ God, you’re such a buzz kill.”

Nathan is hissing. He’s trying really hard not to laugh. Pickles has been sitting on one of his own feet, and he brings the other one up to sit cross legged in his seat. A steady base from which to hit Nathan hard on the arm.

“No, you too--”

“Yeah, I make Daria _nut_ , like, all the time.” Nathan’s smiling at him, all sly. Pickles wants to hit him again.

Murderface makes a statement that Pickles just filters directly into hog-squealing. He’s rescued from a case of terminal secondhand embarrassment when the buzzer to their apartment goes off.

Pickles warns them, apologizes profusely in advance, as he leads them up the rickety fire escape into the apartment. There’s a part of him that is deeply insecure; it feels, somehow, like he is running himself on two lives. Like Frances and Blair are his parents, a little, and he’s worried that his other friends will say some stupid shit to them and they’ll hate him for it, and then Dethklok will hate him for not laughing at the stupid shit. And they’ll all collectively disown him, and start a blood feud amongst themselves over this one night in the apartment, and he’ll have to leave Florida and start fresh with a new dumbfuck name in another terrible city that doesn’t even have the decency to be drivable to the water.

God. Fuck. His guts feel all knotted up, and he’s tempted to ask Frances and Blair to turn right around at the threshold and take him to a hospital where he can go bankrupt looking for the obvious intestinal torsion he’s experiencing and needs surgery for. It’s cold again, tonight, but he’s outside in his stupid crop top because he can’t even feel it from how nervous he is. Frances catches his bare arm as he’s repeatedly failing to get his copy of the keys lined up in the well-worn deadbolt.

“Be cool,” she informs him, easy, as though he is to her what Murderface is to him. And-- he may well be, actually. He remembers many nights where both of them certainly had more eye makeup on, but where she gave him the same advice he’s given Will. He looks back at her, and she runs her thub a second over his bicep. Blair is behind her, on the stairs, and Pickles realizes right then that Blair has never seen Frances actually touch him and that’s why her face looks like it does.

“I like your beanie,” he tells Blair, and Blair nods at him. She’s usually a talker, she’s good for moments like this, and he feels a bit betrayed when she doesn’t have anything to say to him. It’s a couple seconds, out there in the cold, and Frances lets her hand drop. It feels so heavy. He forgets about his guts, a few seconds, but he isn’t sure remembering the cold on his gooseflesh is better. He isn’t sure if it is really actually that cold, or just that he’s afraid to look at Frances.

“We’re going to have a good time, Pickles. It’ll just be like every other time, okay? Be cool. We’re cool.”

“Yeah,” Pickles says back at her, at Frances, and it takes him a second but he looks at her again. “Yeah,” he repeats, but his voice is a little less small in the free wind of that night. He gets his key in the lock, and when he opens the door and leads them in, Skwisgaar chokes on a too-big bong rip.

The first word said in greeting is Frances’ “Weak,” and that gets Will cackling harder than he needs to because he wasn’t expecting it. Everyone gets a seat, and everyone gets acquainted without the awkwardness of a formal introduction, and everything is just... cool.

* * * *

Pickles has taken tabs of Frances’ a lot of times. He knows what he is in for. His body feels warm and tingly, and his face feels more warm and tingly. The texture of the couch cushions and the clothes on his body becomes more and more intense, and it makes him squirmy, but it’s fun, it’s good. His jeans are 100% cotton, no give, and he spends some time lifting his legs and putting them back down so that he can feel the seams, thick, along the insides of his legs when his thighs spread.

Some fractals start-- little waves, off of the shapes of the furniture and the instruments in the room. He can hear the air in his ears layered over the cassette in their tape player, and the music thrums into his being like waves out of time with the beat of the music. Pickles looks down at the little pooch of his stomach where his waistband cuts in, that is exposed by his stupid shirt, and enjoys the way the line of his stomach moves and thrums while his brain tries to find something else in the shape. After a while, he leans his head back against the couch, and closes his eyes.

“Whoa, fuck, looks at that-- lamps-- ceiling,” and the voice is distant and close, at once, like it is at once calling to him from a long way off and inside of his own head. He looks up at the ceiling lamp. It’s a dome light, and he lets his brain convince him it is a titty pushing its way through the ceiling.

“Big sexy lady breaking in,” he offers, and there are a series of hums around him.

“Fuck, you’re right. Fucking-- big titty, in through the ceiling. Big hot lady, she’s gonna-- someone write this down. Someone write this down. Big hot lady in the ceiling, that’s a song.”

There are women laughing, he hears women laughing. The sound of it makes him kind of horny, but he presses it down, because otherwise he’s gonna start immediately getting actually horny about the seam of his jeans and the leather of the couch sticking to the backs of his arms, and the air, moving gently across his throat. Pickles laughs, with them, and runs the palm of his hand over his neck.

He’s had a hand there, before. Sexy... sexy lady hand, yeah. Lacey-- no. He moves his fingers a little bit, letting them tighten a second. The big lady in the ceiling, but she has small little hands, and she holds him there, gentle.

“She’s gonna choke me, dude. She’s-- she’s breakin’ in, she’s gonna do it, I bet.”

“Big sexy lady killer,” Blair offers. He knows it’s her. Pickles looks over at her, and Frances is petting over her buzzcut and humming in agreement.

“That’s a fuckin’ song,” Nathan offers, and Pickles looks right at him. It’s a mistake, looking at him, because his body is all warm and Nathan is hot as fuck, he’s really sexy, too, right then, and Pickles bets he doesn’t know how hot it is to make out when you’re on acid. Nathan’s all... soft lit, appealing. Pickles can see his muscles shifting as he squirms around, too, and he bets there’s like, fibers, in there, and he lets himself fall into thinking that the air stirring in his ears is the sound of all those little muscle fibers moving against themselves. The music, thrumming, thrumming, is something else. Some... symbiosis. Pickles can feel his face is red, and he knows probably it has been red this whole time.

It’ll pass. Let it pass. Pickles closes his eyes, again, and leans his head back against the couch. The conversation drowns out while he focuses on the body high. It’s a good high, too-- Frances always gives him a good body high.

“I fuckin’-- I love you, dude,” Pickles says, out into the air.

Blair is snorting and losing it, and Frances laughs, too, and he lets it swirl around with everything else. When he opens his eyes, he looks at the blanket they’ve put over the TV screen, and he laments that he doesn’t get to see if Nathan is looking back at him.

“What?” Nathan sounds like he’s looking at him. Pickles wonders if he can trust it. He imagines Nathan’s eyes, all big, growing, growing, glowing in his face.

“No, I fuckin’-- you’re the best, dude. Like, holy shit, I feel like, you know-- I’m just some guy, right? And you’re always nice as hell to me, or whatever, and you’re like, so fuckin’ cool.”

Pickles waits to hear what Nathan says back, because it feels like maybe their souls might touch, right? Like probably their souls have been touching, this whole time. And, yeah, Pickles doesn’t particularly believe in souls, or whatever, but definitely secretly he does, and if they’re real (and totally, right now, Pickles thinks they have been this whole time), his and Nathan’s are like two nasty puzzle pieces that fit together. And Nathan gets him better than anyone else, and he’s so fucking nice to him, even though Nathan is like, the coolest person Pickles knows. Even though Nathan is completely a real human, who is better than any other human also, and Pickles doesn’t deserve that.

Murderface calls him gay, and it just makes Pickles laugh because-- holy shit-- he forgot Murderface is there, and he forgot he was with anyone else than Nathan and Frances and Blair, and he forgot himself while he’s talking. Pickles breathes out of his nose, and he wishes he was smoking because he bet that shit would feel amazing, right then.

Nathan laughs, then, a little after everyone else, and Pickles thinks it might be uncomfortable-- but he stops himself, because he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his trip sitting there anxious Nathan hates him now.

“Being like Pickles isn’t being gay, Will,” Nathan offers, and Pickles has to work _so hard_ not to immediately fall into a hole over it.

“Being like Pickles is totally gay, I’m sure. I’m really sure, he’s-- he just said he loves you, that’s pretty fucking gay.”

“Fuckin’s gay, ja.”

Oh no. Oh, shit.

“I won’t let you kill me now, dude,” Pickles says, and Nathan starts losing it, snickering.

“You just lost yourself that wapow, dude, I’m fuckin’-- I’m tellin’ you, you don’t even love me neither? Fuck, and here I thought we were some fuckin’ musical geniuses, and shit. Damn. Cold.”

“Nathan, you was goings to kills Pickle?”

“Yeah, dude, I told him-- I told him, I’d let him do it, too. He was like what, how, and I was like, uh-- I dunno, sounds messy, guns.”

“Wait, so you were really going to kill him? Like murder? Fuck, that’s brutal. God, I should get murdered,” Murderface offers. “Oh, wait, can I kill you, Pickles?”

Pickles scoffs, and looks blearily over at Frances. He doesn’t know why he looks at Frances, but it is a mistake, because she’s all... sad. He can see it, in her face, even though her face shifts around and shines in the light like a holographic puppet. He feels like he is falling, even though he is also hyper-aware of how he’s sitting and sweating on the couch between Nathan and Skwisgaar like he’s a stuck pig in hell. Or, at least, some kind of ill-begotten fire pit.

“Hey, no, not like-- it ain’t like Magnus, okay? Just jokes.”

“Magnus killed someone??” There are at least two question marks, audibly, in his voice. It’s Murderface, that says it, but Pickles doesn’t process that at all. Frances stands up and walks out, really suddenly. He knows the sound of her birkenstocks against the wood better than he thought he would. When he looks at her, it feels like he moves too fast, and he can see the trail of color behind her like ether. Fuck.

Blair gets up and follows her. The purple dress she was wearing swims in the air as strips of light. That’s worse. Pickles shakes his head.

“He didn’t. He didn’t. I-- I shouldn’t have said that. Said that shit. Oh, I fucked up.”

Nathan lets his head flop back against the back of the couch, and Pickles feels it, in the dip of the leather next to him.

“I fucked up,” Nathan says.

“No, dude, I fucked up worse, you--”

“No, I shouldn’t have said that. I was just being fucking... dramatic, there’s other people.”

Pickles snorts, and covers his face with his hands.

“Magnus is a real bad guy, dude, we gotta-- I don’t wanna talk about him, no more.”

It’s quiet, a few seconds. Pickles can smell the sweat off his own body. Garlic-y. _Gross._ The other people that Pickles keeps forgetting about are still there, and they’re watching him, and Pickles imagines their eyes are drills pushing into different spots of his body. One spot, on his body, in the soft spot right below his jaw, where he could easily die.

“Magnus isn’t that bad, come on,” Murderface offers. Pickles puts his hands down.

“No, dude, he is-- I can’t be in a fucking band anymore, with that asshole.”

It’s quiet, another few seconds. When Pickles looks at Skwisgaar, because he’s not one to be quiet, this long, he can see him coming out of his skin. His eyes are bulging, and his features are moving around, and he’s shiny, from sweating. He won’t look at Pickles. Pickles gets a bad feeling in his guts, about it, and so he looks at Will, instead, and Will also is... not even high, and he looks like Pickles has just accused him of murder.

Pickles knits his eyebrows together. He can feel the muscles in his face moving across his skull Ow. Ow, fuck. Pickles squirms around because now he can feel all his muscles, moving around, he can feel all of his particles against the oppressive particles of his clothes.

“What?” Pickles says, and he can hear his voice crack.

“Pickle-- Magnus am--”

“This isn’t a conversation for-- right now, uh. But. Magnus-- you _are_ in a band. With Magnus.”

Pickles lurches forward. Oh, fuck. He remembers his... cat... dream, and he knows he isn’t really hearing it, he knows that, but he can feel Magnus’ breath against the side of his head. _I know you have a pussy._ Magnus’ hands, on his arms, Magnus’ drugs in his blood and his brain, Magnus’ presence, beside him, and he knows rationally it’s Nathan, he knows that, but he’s terrified to look at Nathan because he’s suddenly sure and convinced it’s Magnus. That the couch, below him, is his water bed, and Magnus is there as Lacey and instead of her telling him she’s disappointed in him that he’s high, right then, it’s just a mix tape of things Pickles also doesn’t want to hear.

He feels that weight, heavy on him.

_Watch those chompers, kid,_ and then that way Magnus laughs. Low down, in his throat, in that way that draws you in to hear it a little, so that he can hurt you when you are close to him. So bitter, and angry, in a way that makes Pickles wonder where the fuck he came from if it was not hell itself.

Pickles watches as the grooves in the wood swim around like soundwaves. Like brown hair, under his feet, even though he knows, knows, it is not hair, that it’s really solid, and he’s just letting himself fall ass backwards into a bad trip. Pickles digs his nails into his arms.

_No one else sees you. I see you._

They feel like brands. Little burned moons, into the thick of his arms. Into the freckles slowly mounting into a farmer’s tan over the years.

_You belong in a fucking garbage can, man._

“No,” Pickles offers. “No, I’m not. I’m-- I’m not in a band, with that guy.”

“He got us a record deal, okay? I couldn’t tell him no after--”

Pickles stands up, too.

“No, I’m not! I’m not, anymore. Fuck. Fuck, dude, I gotta get out of here. I gotta get out of here. Where’s Frances?”

Nathan breathes out, beside him, and Pickles looks back at him. Nathan looks up at him and his eyes seem too bright in the mask of his face, like two emeralds, like they really are glowing, and Pickles knows surely that it’s the drugs in his system making them like that. Like he’s looking down at some ancient creature that could kill him, but it feels bad for him and wouldn’t.

“Don’t fuckin’ look at me like that.”

“I’m, uh-- don’t fucking look at me, like that, either. Calm down.”

Pickles curls his nose.

“Don’t fuckin’ look at me, then, and you won’t see me fuckin’ lookin’ at you.”

Nathan stands up. Pickles scoffs, and pushes at him, and he can feel every fiber of the cotton in Nathan’s shirt through every line of his finger prints. Like he is a gecko or some shit. Nathan doesn’t move. He’s scarier, because he’s so much taller. Pickles isn’t scared.

Pickles will never be scared. Not again.

“I’m not fuckin’ scared of you, dude, sit your ass back down.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you mad at _me_?”

“Why am I mad at you? Holy shit, are you-- do you have a fuckin’ hole in your head and your whole brain leaked out? I’m not gonna just be in a band with Magnus. You should have _asked me_.”

Pickles shoves Nathan, again, and Nathan grabs him by both his upper arms and holds him in place. Pickles tries to twist out of it, and he can’t, of course he can’t, because Nathan is a behemoth and Nathan is an unstoppable force even against a guy that isn’t Pickles’ size. It burns him worse, because he likes it, a little, and he’s scared Nathan will think he likes it a _lot_ , and he’s scared everyone around them will go oh, look at Pickles, and all of them will simultaneously go ‘he really _is_ a girl inside’,

Pickles spits at Nathan, and Nathan drops him.

“Get out,” Nathan tells him, and Pickles is so mad. He’s so fucking mad. “You need to get out and calm down. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Pickles is breathing so hard. He balls his little hands up and he looks at the rest of them-- and they’re scared. They’re fucking pussies, is what they are, and they’re not jumping in, and Pickles can’t know what they think, rationally, but he knows somehow in his high that they must surely be against him, now.

“Fuck you. Don’t call me. I’m not-- you call Mark Tomlinson and ask him to paint your nails and talk to you about your jock strap. I’m fuckin’ done. I’m not-- I’m fuckin’ done with you, Nate.”

“You don’t... mean that.”

“Fuck you, I don’t say shit I don’t mean. You don’t know me.”

“I do.”

“No, you fuckin’-- god, I thought we were friends.”

“Pickles--”

“No, shut up. You’re a bastard, Nathan Explosion, you’re a fuckin’-- you act all nice to me, all this time, and then you sell me out and just do this-- this shit, to me. Magnus is gonna ruin this band, and you’re gonna go down with him, and you’ll deserve it, you fuckin’ _douchebags._ ”

Nathan’s eyes are brighter. They’re growing, in his face, and when he moves they catch the light in fractals and traces. They’re hypnotic, almost. Pickles wants to pull the both of them out, and keep them, as a necklace. Wear them around his neck so he can remember never to trust anyone again. Remember how many times he’s learned this lesson.

Pickles turns, and he leaves, and he slams the door as hard as he’d like to hit Nathan in his big dumb face. When he gets downstairs, Frances’ car is gone. Pickles gets in his van, and he drives himself directly to the docks down the street because he isn’t in a position to go very far, the way the lines on the streets swim, but he can’t stand to stay where he’s at, and then he piles a bunch of mad dog down on top of the acid until he’s out for the night. Until he can’t remember it, anymore.

* * * *

_He’s driving. He’s on a highway, he’s driving. The yellow lines between the two roads are swimming. He looks ahead, because there’s someone sitting next to him, there’s someone in the passenger seat, and he finds them beyond unsettling. He can feel them looking hard into the side of his head, he can feel them, and he knows somehow if he looks at them he’s going to die._

_The stars, in the night sky, are all green eyes, trained in on him. Pickles tightens his hands on the steering wheel. The person beside him reaches their hand between his legs, rests it, uneasy, on his inner thigh. He tries to pull his legs together, to press them, together, but he’s frozen._

_Ah, he knows this dream. He’s been in this dream, many times. It doesn’t make the terror less. He’s usually not the one in the driver’s seat. He waits for them to ask him if he likes the song on the radio, because they always do, and that’s when he usually can move, again. When he can turn things around. They don’t, though._

I got what you need, buddy.

_Pickles recognizes that voice. For the first time in a long time, he sees something ahead, in the road. Nathan isn’t wearing his clothes, and he looks terrified, but he stands there. His eyes glow green so bright they light up his cheeks._

_Pickles tries to swerve, and a big hand covers his on the steering wheel. It fights him, steadies his line in the road towards his best friend. Pickles looks at Magnus, pleadingly._

I don’t want it-- _he tells him. His voice is higher than he is used to it being. Magnus laughs at him, low, in his throat._

Fucks like you and me, we don’t get to dream. We only get to ruin.

_They hit Nathan. Pickles is crying, desperately, he’s crying. There’s black blood, like tar, all over the hood of his brother’s old car. From when they were teenagers. Pickles has never seen that much blood. It’s like it keeps coming, flowing back over the hood, onto the windshield. The windshield blacks out, and it’s dark, just him and Magnus and that laugh, and Magnus’ hand, on his leg. Magnus digs his long nails in, and Pickles realizes they’re naked, in the dark, and Magnus’ nails grow, and grow, and pierce on through the flesh of his thigh. The pain is so bad. The pain is the worst thing he’s ever felt. Pickles grabs his hand, and starts pulling, at it, he tries as best he can to pull it out. The more he struggles the more he can feel them, the nails, the claws, tearing up his leg._

_Magnus is laughing at him, but it isn’t only Magnus’ voice-- there’s a lot of them. His brother, Frances. Nathan. Fuck. Fuck, he’s got to get out of here. Wake up. Wake up._ **Wake up.**

* * * *

He doesn’t have water for his dry throat, as he wakes up. He can tell immediately that he’s still tripping, because the sun is bright and lovely and comes down on him through his roof vent like streaming tresses of blonde hair. He picks up the-- what was he working on after the mad dog? Pickles lifts up the bottle next to him, and he squints down at the label blearily. Whiskey. He drinks some, and his body is angry that it isn’t water, but he manages both to avoid immediately vomiting and to determine that the whiskey is not, in fact, very _good_ whiskey. He coughs hoarsely, and then presses his face down into his pillow. He offers a groan up into the air above him, muffled, and balls one of his little fists up in the edge of his pillowcase. The seam feels nice, like his jeans did, before he’d apparently ripped them off. He gives himself a couple of minutes, and another swig of his shit-whiskey, and then he commits to the arduous process of sitting all the way up.

His head is pounding. He’s not been hungover and tripping at the same time before, or at least he hasn’t done it this old. He can feel the regret creeping into his bones, and he chooses actively not to think about it. He puts it in a cardboard box in the back of his head, and tapes it up, and puts it with all the other shit he’s intending to leave behind.

Pickles finds his pants, and he manages to get a flannel on, but he’s too lazy and nauseous to look down at his own chest to do up the buttons. He gets his lame fucking cowboy boots pulled on, as if he can’t be bothered with buttons he definitely cannot be bothered with laces. Every time he moves his body in the shame and shade of his van, it hurts, and he offers himself a grunt as a complaint on behalf of each of his joints. He is excited to feel the heat and sun of that city on his skin, and he is sure, somehow, that the pain will stop if only he can get himself outside. Before long, he tumbles out of the back of his van, intent once again to walk around and smoke until his problems have dissipated.

The colors outside are bright and lovely. The wind is neon hands, brushing against him, propelling him forward, like he is crowd surfing a potholder convention, and the sun beats down on him in a way that feels personal, like an oven that presses in on him alone. The menthols on his tongue taste like pure heaven. Like adventures at sea, like his tongue is being tucked into bed in an Indian summer. He intends to spend the rest of his trip as it should have been, in this place that he likes, ignoring those things which followed him and stalked him through the night, howling in his heart like wolves.

* * * *

When Pickles first met Charles Ofdensen, Charles was a sophomore in college, and Charles didn’t know Pickles was his own age. It had been at a concert, and Charles had shown up in a suit for an autograph, and he’d been sweating and slicking back his mullet with either free hand. He had moved around like he had a bunch of small suns in his body masquerading around as bones. Pickles told him to come back later, with coke, to scare him, and Charles had just looked at him and told him “I-- I don’t know how” and Pickles had laughed, and winked at him, and told him “Yeah, dude, that’s the joke.”

Pickles pretends he doesn’t remember this meeting, because it had left Charles embarrassingly starstruck, and because it made every subsequent meeting pure hell. Because Pickles knows he isn’t worthy of hero worship, and that’s all Charles seems to want to offer him.

“It’s been a while,” Pickles says, into the phone receiver. He hears Charles swallow, and imagines that instead of being awkward, it is just because Charles is living in a large fish bowl and he is actually unable to talk. He can’t convince himself it is true, of course, because he’s not so high anymore. He takes a drink of the Pino Grig he’s stolen from a local supermarket.

“Who is this?” Charles asks him, and Pickles scoffs at him.

“You meet anyone else with an accent like this?” Pickles asks him, and Charles laughs, a little, that magnificent bastard. Maybe this is exactly what Pickles needs. 

“It’s been a while,” Charles tells him, repeats at him.

“Yeah. Yeah. You wanna fix that, chief?”

Charles is quiet, a couple of seconds. He breathes out, and Pickles can hear him tapping. It isn’t his finger, tapping, but Pickles imagines maybe it’s a pen, right? Or clicking, maybe he’s clicking the pen.

“How did you find me?”

“Phone book.”

“Ah.”

It’s quiet, another couple of seconds. Pickles turns, wrapping a finger in the curliqued line connecting the headset to the phone booth, and leans against the too-hot glass wall.

“Can I pick you up?” Charles asks him, and Pickles is so relieved he could die.

“Depends. I’m gonna need a drink, when I see you.”

* * * *

Charles’ apartment is much nicer than the last time Pickles met him. It had been seven months or so, prior, before Dethklok had formed. Charles had tied his tie around his head because Pickles thought it would be funny, and had told him he couldn’t do any coke for a few weeks, and Pickles can see, now, that it had worked out for him, not doing any coke.

Pickles sits down in perhaps the nicest leather chair he’s ever sat in. Charles hands him a glass of dark liquor, and it’s expensive, Pickles can taste it is expensive, and he’s surprised it isn’t whiskey.

“Godfather, huh? You learn to mix drinks?”

“Among other things. How’s the amaretto? I bought it for a client, and they didn’t drink very much.”

“They’re a fuckin’ idiot. Shit’s good.”

Charles nods, and sits at another matching plush leather chair opposite Pickles. Charles is wearing his suit, parts of it, but the pants are a pricier cut, tailored, and the shirt fits the lines of his body so closely. Pickles doesn’t know what Charles does, now, that he’s suddenly become this wealthy old guy, but he’s impressed.

“You a drug dealer, now?”

Charles seems caught off guard, and he snorts. He’s still bashful, deep down, and he hides it by taking a drink. His voice is strained when he starts speaking again, even if it falls into its regular depth and warmth after the first few words. It seems he isn’t used to it yet, the good stuff.

“No, I’m not a drug dealer now.”

Pickles hums, and nods. There’s a bricked up fireplace ahead of them, and at least one more bookcase than the last time Pickles had seen him. Pickles feels certain, somehow, that in this one bedroom apartment he’s managed to house all of the human canon. It’s quiet, a few seconds, and for the first time around Charles Ofdensen, Pickles feels out of depth. Pickles studies him, a few seconds, and then finishes his drink and stands to mix himself a more bourbon-heavy variation. Charles watches him, and his eyes are sharp. It used to be Charles was this big, naive kid that Pickles could bully and play with as he pleased, but each time he meets him, again, he feels more and more like a mouse before a falcon. He rolls his shoulders, some, to shake off the unsettled feeling.

“Good. You’re too nice, for that.”

“I’m nice?”

“Yeah, dude. Real nice. Lettin’ me drink all your booze. Lettin’ me ask you weird questions. I reckon-- I reckon you’re about the nicest guy I know, right now.”

Charles hums, again, and when Pickles looks back at him he’s looking at him all intensely. Peeked over his glass, with it pressed to his upper lip. Like he’s the billboard, that eyeglasses billboard in the Great Gatsby. Pickles promises himself right then that when he gets back to his van, he’s going to beat his _own_ ass for thinking like a fucking nerd. Pickles looks at that bricked up fireplace, and he wishes there was fire, in there, so that there would be something to distract his gaze. Charles reminds Pickles so much of Nathan, in that moment, and it knots up all his guts to think about.

“I heard you’re in a band, again.”

Pickles scoffs at him, and he’s angry, when he looks at Charles. Charles usually would shy away and tell him ‘sorry’, when Pickles looked at him like that, but he doesn’t, this time. Pickles hates it that he realizes that, like everyone else, Charles has been growing and changing without him. Pickles kicks his legs out, a little, like he is a little kid.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Saw a poster.”

“You saw a poster? You really just saw a poster?”

“Yes.”

Pickles laughs, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. He shakes his head.

“Well, it’s done. I left.”

Charles hums, and it is his turn to get up to refill his drink. When he returns, he’s got the bourbon. Pickles smiles at him, for his immense grace and kindness in this matter. It’s a couple minutes, quiet, and drinking, and then Charles asks Pickles the question Pickles was hoping he wouldn’t.

“Why?”

Pickles groans and lets himself slide downwards in his chair. He’s all squirmy. Somehow it feels as though he’s in therapy.

“They’re lame, that’s why.”

Charles nods, all... serenely. He takes another smooth sip of his drink and then looks at Pickles again. Pickles doesn’t like him, so much, now that he’s all smooth.

“Why are they lame?”

Pickles puts all of the air in his entire body out of his nose at once. He groans. He drinks. He doesn’t want to have this conversation. He doesn’t want to have this conversation at least until he can feel his cheeks heating up from the booze. He downs the rest of his drink and he closes his eyes and he waits, a while.

Ah. There.

“They put Magnus in the band without asking me.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Magnus is the worst, dude. I fuckin’-- I hate that guy.”

It’s quiet, another while longer. Charles is good at that, being quiet, waiting for Pickles to start talking again. Pickles always feels like he has to fill an empty space, and Charles had learned that lesson early on, and Charles always seemed to hang on Pickles’ every word like he was so cool and so interesting. Pickles opens his eyes again and looks at Charles, again.

Charles looks at him the way dads look at kids in movies. It is nearly physically painful, and so Pickles rolls his eyes.

“I thought Magnus was your best friend,” Charles offers, and that just earns a second eye roll.

“Yeah, well, he ain’t anymore. He’s a bastard. I’m-- Nathan is now, too.”

Pickles rests his forearm over his face. He can tell he’s started to flush from drinking. It’s really, really nice booze.

“I think you’re my only friend, now.”

“Woe is you,” Charles offers, and Pickles looks at him in time to catch the rare smile gracing his face. “Should I offer you some money?”

It’s a joke, and Pickles knows it. He snickers. If they were younger, Pickles might say something like ‘why, do you want me to suck your dick?’ just to be scandalous and to embarrass Charles. But Pickles has begun to suspect that the marvelous creature inhabiting the body of his only longtime fan might not be so easily embarrassed, anymore. The same way something living in Pickles’ own heart this last decade has been slowly eating up the sadism he finds greatly diminished. There’s something lovely about an evening with Ofdensen that doesn’t involve daring him to eat an entire jar of pickled eggs.

They go back and forth, a bit more, before Charles does Pickles the mercy of allowing him to wallow in both silence and in drink.

* * * *

Charles allows Pickles to finish that hundred dollar bourbon with him, in his living room, and Pickles wakes up with one boot off and his hair all wild on the red Persian carpet there. He’s hungover, again, but it is less painful than the morning before because he isn’t waking up aware of how all his protons are in the wrong place. Charles seems to be awake, already, in his too-big kitchen. Pickles can hear the microwave running. He rolls over and sits up, and discovers, disgruntled, that he is not tall enough to see over the counters at this distance. Pickles begins the arduous process of standing up, leaning heavily on Charles’ teak coffee table. 

“You still like the yolks raw, Pickles?”

Charles is wearing this stupid robe, while he’s cooking. Pickles can see his hairy legs jutting out from beneath it. He’s wearing _boat shoes_.

“Charlie, dude-- I think I might hate you.”

“So you want them cooked?”

“No way.”

Charles takes the potatoes out of the microwave, and sets them in a bowl on the countertop beside the sink. He cracks an egg on the rim of the stainless steel, and then passes the insides back and forth in the shell. He dumps the raw yolk over the potatoes.

“There’s salt in the cabinet above the dishwasher.”

Pickles hums, and he goes over there to retrieve it. The most important part of his bastard breakfast. He finds some tabasco in the fridge, even though Charles is himself practically allergic to spicy things, and he puts an amount of spurts into his potatoes that he thinks will threaten his last and final friend. Charles, for his part, probably cannot be surprised by Pickles anymore, and gets back to his coffee maker.

“Fancy guy, huh? All these appliances.”

“Good job, now.”

Pickles offers a ‘huh’, in place of saying anything else. There’s something about it that makes him uncomfortable, and he doesn’t want to dig too far into that feeling because he’s worried he might figure out that he’s being a piece of shit. Pickles boosts himself up to sit on the countertop next to the sink to eat.

“You’re not hungry?”

“I already ate. It’s almost eleven.”

Pickles nods, and starts eating. It’s good. Charles seems to microwave a potato better than anyone else.

“I, ah-- I have some paperwork I need to get through. When you’re finished you can just leave the plate in the sink.”

“Okay.”

Charles is quiet, and Pickles is quiet, another few seconds. Pickles doesn’t usually hang around, after breakfast, and so Pickles figures Charles must be waiting for him to provide an excuse to get outside soon. Pickles doesn’t have anywhere to go, though, for maybe the first time.

Pickles wants Charles to say something to him, to make him feel a little bit better, about it, but Charles is silent, again, as he leaves the kitchen in his stupid red robe, and enters a room just off of the living area. Pickles wants Charles to look at him, one more time, before he closes the door, but he doesn’t.

Pickles feels empty. He finishes eating, in case that will help.

It doesn’t help. Pickles goes back into the living room, aimless. He finds the liquor cabinet, aimless. He uncaps the amaretto.

Aim.

Pickles drinks it directly from the bottle and winces at how sweet it is. There’s a better feeling, he can chase, than being empty. That can make his face warm, and his insides fluid, and all of his bad memories really far away.

There’s a record player, a nice stand-up job. When he opens the top, it stays open. A Zenith Hi-Fi. Pickles recognizes the inside, the needle, as being one of the older ones. He’d known someone, once, who had one like this, but with a different chassis. Pickles drinks some more, and then investigates around and he manages to find a box of albums.

There’s a signed photograph of him, in there. When he was young. He doesn’t remember taking it, but he was high a lot, then, and he drank possibly more than he did now, and he doesn’t remember a lot of the time he was in Snakes N Barrels. Pickles can’t find any of his records in there, though. That hurts him, for some reason-- because Charles used to have all of his tapes, and Charles didn’t want to buy them, again, when he started listening to vinyl. The records are mostly jazz.

It’s interesting, how Charles’ tastes changed.

Pickles finds one a little different. Van Morrison. He puts it on, and turns the volume up to just under where he thinks Charles might hear it from whatever mysterious room he’s stolen off to. It matches, good, with the taste of the amaretto. Pickles pulls his nose, and he drinks, and then he lays back down on that carpet he’d slept on with his old, pointy bones, and he feels oppressed, somehow. He feels like the air in the apartment has become heavy, and it is difficult to breathe, kind of, but also the gravity upon him is so much that he can’t hardly move but to bring the bottle up to his lips.

It becomes night more quickly than he can anticipate it. He wants to cry, kind of, but he can’t. He can’t do anything but look too close at the popcorn ceiling, and imagine the things he might have seen the night before if he hadn’t gone and had it fucked up. It’s like no time has passed, at all, until Charles comes into the living room and turns on the lights, and jumps, a little, to see Pickles still there.

Charles picks up the boot that Pickles has left by an armchair, and brings it over to him, and Charles leaves it beside him. Pickles wants so badly for Charles to say something, to him, even if it is just to tell him to leave, but Charles doesn’t.

Pickles closes his eyes. He hears Charles reset the record player, change the record. It’s a jazz album, and Pickles doesn’t recognize it. He doesn’t realize Charles has come back until he hears the creak of Charles sitting down in one of his leather chairs. Pickles sits there, with him, a long while. He lets the time shift, again, and he goes to drink more amaretto, and he’s finished off the bottle, it turns out. He blinks, a couple of times.

“I miss him,” Pickles says, and Charles hums at him.

“Who?”

“That bastard.”

“Magnus?”

“Nathan.”

It’s quiet, another while longer. It’s painful. He knows Charles doesn’t know Nathan, and he wishes that Charles thought better of him than to think he misses Magnus. He remembers the dreams he’s had, Magnus, haunting him like a fucking ghost.

A _spector_ , Magnus would say, and he’d twinkle his fingers so all his stupid rings would shine in the light. Pickles looks, longer, at the texture in the ceiling.

“I called him a bastard.”

“You’ve called me a bastard, plenty of times.”

Pickles nods, and he knows Charles didn’t see it, but Charles lets him wallow in the music again for a couple of seconds.

“Do you want to call him?”

“No,” Pickles says immediately. He thinks Charles nods, too. He imagines Charles nods back at him. The music plays, a little while longer, and he hears a sequence of notes he would like to play on a guitar instead of a saxophone, because he bets it would sound really cool. He closes his eyes, again, and he imagines the night of their trip never happened, and that he can just run over to Nathan’s old apartment and tell him excitedly about how he thinks it could trail into another riff he knows. He bets Skwisgaar would like it, even, because if you play it real fast it’d be too hard for most people. It’d be too hard, for Pickles.

Pickles breathes hard, out of his nose.

“There’s a phone in my office.”

“I said I ain’t wanna call him, dude.”

Charles hums, and it is the most infuriating hum Pickles has ever heard. He remembers Lacey always used to do that, to him, when she thought he was talking crazy, and he remembers all the times they ended up throwing things at one another once he started an argument about it. He remembers the sound of it. His guitars, into the hardwood , her dishes into the walls, a lamp whizzing by his head.

But Charles isn’t Lacey. His hums don’t mean _You’re getting too old for heroin, and you don’t have a real dick._ Charles’ hums are like a whole language, of their own.

Pickles sits up.

“Where’s your office?” Charles is reading, when Pickles asks him, and if Pickles wasn’t looking at him head on he would have missed Charles leaning his head to the side in the direction of where he’d been doing work, earlier. Pickles is wobbly getting up, like he is a great many times. He steadies himself on the coffee table, and leans on his knees a few seconds before he gets all the way there. He looks at Charles, to see if Charles will laugh at him, and Charles is reading, again.

Pickles doesn’t say anything to him, as he stumbles his way into the vestibule of three doors. The glass doorknob is heavy and cold in his hand as he turns it.


	5. Heaven and Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles comes on as band manager. Pickles rejoins the band, in spite of his reservations. He remembers some things and has some feelings about them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I do not plan on doing daily updates until this is done, but I had a lot of feelings about this and it ended up turning into a chapter much more quickly than I was expecting. From here I am planning mainly on doing weekly updates, ideally.

Pickles isn’t good at it, saying the things he needs to say. He always gets anxious, somehow, on the phone. He can’t see Nathan’s face. He imagines it how he usually looks at him, reflected in the screen of the TV. He imagines it how he saw it, that night, drunk in Nathan’s bed, when Nathan told him that he knows and he doesn’t care.

Pickles presses his lips together. Charles’ office is nice. Charles’ office is so nice it feels like it cannot possibly belong to the Charlie he knows from years before, but Pickles supposes there are some benefits to cutting the bottom of your mullet off. He always knew Charles was smarter than anyone else he knew, and he supposes now that perhaps success is inevitable for those people who have good parents and whose good parents have a lot of money.

“What number is this?” is the first think Nathan asks him, and Pickles scoffs. The line is quiet, a couple of minutes, so that Pickles can look at the too-big painting of a skull and a dagger on the wall. There’s something about it that’s brutal.

“Does it matter, dude?” Pickles asks him. It almost feels like he’s looking at this ladder. Like in his head, there’s this ladder, and Nathan’s at the top. The way things were, before, is at the top, and he’s sitting there debating just giving in and climbing on up it. There’s a part of him worried, though, that the ladder’s broken, or that once he’s halfway Nathan will push him off and laugh at him for trying. Pickles worries at the phone line some more.

“Uh-- no, I guess.”

The quiet, again. The quiet used to be so comfortable, between them. Pickles wonders if that’s gone forever. He breathes out, and lets the hand he’s been worrying in the curly cable to the phone drop onto Charles’ teak desk. He looks at himself in the reflection of Charles’ big box computer. He looks at himself, and he realizes he looks like shit.

“Do you wanna hang out? I, uh-- I ain’t got any weed, though.”

“Yeah! Uh-- yeah, that’s cool.”

Pickles is quiet again, for too long. It all feels so awkward, like a muscle he doesn’t know how to flex. He’s unfamiliar with it, making up. He sits back in the desk chair, and he looks back up at the oil painting next to the door. He wonders who painted it. He wonders... what it means, if it means something, to him. He looks into the holes, where the eyes presumably were. He imagines them, green, glowing, like in his dream. Like in Nathan’s face, while he was tripping.

“Can you meet me down by the docks? I got some-- I’ll bring booze.”

“When?”

Pickles breathes out, and looks around for a clock, anywhere. He has no goddamn clue what time it is. He doesn’t see one, and he should have known there wouldn’t be one, since Charlie was wearing this thousand dollar watch even though all else he donned was a robe. That’s probably how Charles is naive, still, how he’s like he used to be. He doesn’t want to look at anything else. Pickles realizes what he’s thinking probably doesn’t make any sense.

He wishes for once he hadn’t drunk so much.

“What time is it now?”

“Uhh--” there’s a gap, of maybe forty seconds. When Nathan gets back on the phone there’s a little crash, and his voice is a little harried. Pickles wonders how far he had to go to check.

“I don’t know.”

Pickles laughs, a little. “Me either. Can we-- is now okay? Just meet me down there?”

“Yeah,” Nathan says, and his voice is all casual, but he says it a little too fast. Some part of it makes Pickles feel a little  _ more _ uncomfortable.

“Okay, uh-- bye.”

Pickles hangs up before he hears Nathan tell him bye. He has a bad habit of doing that. Magnus asked him about it, once, and Pickles told him like it was a joke,  _ I get enough of that as it is. Don’t need it on the phone, too. _

Lame. Fuck, he used to be so lame. Pickles leans forward on the too-nice teak desk, and plays his fingers along a gold pen in a cup at the head of it. He can see his face in that, too, all warped. He knows he should get going, but there’s some part of him that wants to avoid it just a little bit longer, that wants to put it off. He’s got some sense in his bones and in his cells that this is going to be bad, and that he shouldn’t get his hopes up-- because he’s always disappointed.

He’s just gotta get accustomed to being alone. He just has to get used to being lonely. Things like him, they don’t get to dream. They only get to ruin, right? He’s got this hole in him, you know? He doesn’t know where from. Maybe ‘cause his mom didn’t love him, or maybe because she liked his brother better. Maybe from one of many countless terrible things that he’s done or that have been done to him. But it’s a vacuum right at his solar plexus, and any time he gets close to something good it has this nasty tendency of sucking those things right in.

It’s a black hole, like in space, it’s got this unimaginable gravity to it that just crushes anything that gets too close to it, and then it stays hungry, it gets hungrier. It’s all he can do to try and hide it, all of his vast and painful emptiness. Nathan is getting too close to that. Pickles needs not to ruin him, with it, whatever parts of Nathan are the parts that Pickles thinks have a shot of actually making it.

Nathan Explosion isn’t a bastard. He’s just maybe got too many bastards around him. He’s just... naive, sometimes, he doesn’t have a hole for a heart and he doesn’t know how people like Pickles are when they meet someone like him. And, sure, Pickles doesn’t  _ mean _ to use him, right? But-- fuck--

Pickles digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. He’s got to go. He’s got to get out of here. He’s got to find out if he’s the skull, or if he’s the curly dagger through it. 

When Pickles comes back out of the office, his cowboy boots slapping uneasily on the polished hardwood floors, Charles is dressed and smoking on his couch. He seems surprised, almost, to see Pickles exiting the office already. Pickles pulls his nose, and looks off to the side, a bit. This is awkward, too, because he’s-- he always likes to frame favors from Charles as favors he’s doing for Charles. And Charles has a bad habit of just  _ letting him _ .

But Charlie is different now, isn’t he? Charles isn’t some magnificent bastard, Charles was with Pickles to see what it’s like to be ruined. Like Pickles is some animal in a zoo Charles particularly likes, but Charles isn’t a professional zookeeper. Not his whole  _ life _ . Pickles feels out of place, and he always does, sure, but it’s more crushing right that moment.

Charles puts his book down, and stands up, brushing off the thighs of his slacks.

“Do you need a ride?”

Ah.  _ Ah _ . Pickles pets along the side of his neck, and he scoffs, a little, training his eyes in on the empty door frame he’s just emerged from. The... entryway, to the mystery vestibule.

“So you wanna play keeper, a little longer?”

When he looks at Charles, Charles has his eyebrows ticked close together. Pickles knows that face, he knows that Charles is confused and that Charles doesn’t want to admit to him that he’s confused. That face means  _ I’m already embarrassed, and an explanation would be further mortification.  _ Pickles smiles at him a little. He feels bashful, kind of. Foolish.

“I-- yeah. Yeah, I could use a ride. You wanna tag along?”

Charles smiles at him. Pickles sees the ghost of the goofy kid he used to know. It feels good. It feels good a way he’s been waiting to feel good, that he’d forgotten in all his misery the last few days.

“Yes.”

* * * *

Pickles loves to be outside. He finds out what time it is, when he gets there. There’s this connection human beings have, where everything gains a little bit of magic and hope in those areas of the day when the sun rests in transition. There is a special thing, he thinks, about watching the sun wake up and watching it go to bed like any other person. The dusk in Tampa, that night, is grey-orange and riddled with warm fog. Charles lets him smoke in the car, and lets Pickles make fun of him for smoking organic cigarettes. Charles lets Pickles tell him that American Spirits taste better than any of the others, as though he doesn’t already know.

Nathan is leaning on his bike, and seeing his figure gain size in the distance as they pull into park-- it feels as prophetic and magnanimous as the sunset itself. If Pickles was a softer guy he would want to write a song about it, this feeling he has, as though he is some prodigal son returning home to the good things in his life. The embarrassment at having fought with him and called him a bastard gets in the way.

He’s got more of Charlie’s nice booze tucked into his jacket. It feels heavier, and he feels dumb when he realizes that that is because it is in a glass bottle instead of the plastic ones he has become accustomed to. It’s gin. It’s  _ good _ gin. Nathan perks up, seeing Pickles come out at him, and the the way his big lunk head tilts to the side as actual adult business man Charles Foster Ofdensen approaches him makes it all feel funny. In a good way, funny, in a way that could make Pickles laugh if he wasn’t all nervous again. He looks at Charles, and Charles nods at him.

Pickles doesn’t know what the nod means. He can’t read it, the way he can’t read a lot of what Charlie does, these days. Pickles lets his smile falter, falling off to the side a bit. The ground is damp and giving under his feet. He stumbles forward like he’s a newborn fawn, and it ruins the effect as he brandishes his Sapphire Bombay bottle. Nathan’s eyes widen a little, and he scoffs. He takes the bottle, though, and opens it all easy with his big, strong hands.

Pickles snickers, and tells him “Hey, dude.” Nathan’s eyebrows jump like he hadn’t expected to have to speak, just yet, and Pickles laughs at him for it.

“Uh... hey,” Nathan says, eventually, drinking and letting his eyes get drawn back over to the suit Pickles has towed along with him.

“Ah-- hello.” Charles says, and Nathan follows up, quick, “Not you.”

Pickles snickers some more, and leans against a post at the mouth of the dock that people used to tie boats too, back when you might fish out here. Back before all the pollution, back before all the grime. He rolls his shoulders. His bare arms feel nice, in the warm air. He loves the smell of the ocean, having grown up estranged from it, and fond to be in a place that was once unfamiliar to him.

“Be nice, Charlie’s cool.”

Nathan looks Charles over, one more time. Charles has the good sense to look cool, for once, standing all easy like he’s been to this dock and done all this a hundred times over. Pickles remembers when he used to introduce Charles to his friends, the kick he’d get, watching Charles turn into this little warbling nerd about meeting anyone who knew their way around a guitar pick. Pickles misses it, a little, even though he knows the way Charles is now is better. Even though he knows Charles acting like he knows what he’s doing suits his needs, right then.

Nathan likes people like that, who don’t say too much. Pickles is one of the only people Nathan likes, that says too much.

“He doesn’t  _ look _ cool.”

“Nah, but, uh-- I been talkin’ to him, right?”

Nathan breathes out of his nose, all uneasy. Nathan’s got what you might call a distinctive nose, he’s got nostrils like umbrellas and a big, belligerent hook, and when he snorts like that you might call it an act of war. Pickles always liked that, about him, he remembers all the times he wishes he could do shit like that. When he snorts, he imagines he looks like a potbellied pig.

Pickles snorts back, in something like defiance.

“I wanna-- I’m just gonna, uh. That’s not just a present for you, dude, let me have some.”

Right. Booze. His guardian angel, his saving grace. The best friend he could have when his guts play Cat’s Cradle like they do, right now. Nathan points the mouth of the bottle at him, and Pickles takes it to have some himself. The juniper rolls up into his sinuses, slides smooth down the back of his throat. The sting is pleasant, homely. Beguiling. He remembers why he likes it so much.

“I wanna-- I need... to. Say some stuff to you, dude.”

Nathan just looks at him. His eyes are hard, but Pickles can tell that he’s interested. Pickles just has to put the words together and he’s sure that Nathan will hear him out. He practiced it, in his head, in his rambles to Charles on their way across town. He’s being blessed, he’s just got to climb the ladder back up to where he was. Now that... Charles has secured the bottom of it, for him. He looks up at Nathan, and the height difference is usually something exciting. Right then it feels dangerous and meaningful. He knows it’s just the sun setting around them that makes him feel like that, he knows it’s his nerves, but he tries to ride it a bit as the booze blooms in his blood.

“I’m, um. It’s. I’m sorry.”

“Okay.” Nathan says, immediately.

“I shouldn’t have called you a bastard.”

Nathan looks over at Charles. He’s... hostile. When he looks back at Pickles, Pickles can tell that he wants to know why Charles is here, and he wants to know why this meeting isn’t going how he’s expected it to. Nathan’s hair is all in his face and he’s lurking and sulking about it, in there. That’s a little funny, too, Pickles realizes, and Pickles smiles at him for it. Pickles looks out over the water. Out at the reflection of the dying light.

“So I-- I get it. With Magnus.”

Nathan breathes out, and he looks at the ground. Pickles feels let up, a little, now that Nathan isn’t pinning anyone down with his gaze.

“No, I shouldn’t have told you, like that.”

Pickles presses his lips together, and he takes another drink before he passes the bottle back to Nathan. Since Nathan isn’t looking at him, it takes him a second to realize what Pickles is trying to do. When he does, he takes it readily. His hands are awkward, in the pass off.

Pickles knows, you know-- that’s the closest Nathan ever really gets to apologizing.

Pickles breathes out. The humid air feels good, in his lungs. Like this place is friendly to him.

“If it’s-- if you guys are cool, then. I’m cool,” Pickles says. He doesn’t know how else to ask Nathan to be in the band, again, because all of it is viscerally painful. He looks at Nathan, head on, so he can try and see any shift in his mask of a face that might betray some kindness. Anything.

Nathan looks at him, back, and meets his eyes. There’s a couple of beats, like that, and then Nathan smiles a little and he drinks.

“Yeah, uh-- it’s cool.”

Pickles smiles big, then, and he pumps his little fist about it because maybe he’s the dork, now. Nathan sees him, and it gets another scoff from him. The mood feels... easier, now that the hard part is over. Pickles sees Nathan look at Charles, again, now that some of the uneasiness has faded. The curiosity is bigger than the hostility, right then, but Pickles thinks probably he’s the only one of him aware of it.

“Charlie’s-- he’s gonna--”

Nathan’s eyebrows tick up when he looks back at Pickles. It’s funny, seeing how him and Charles are similar, right then. Charles puts his hands into the pocket of his sports coat and takes a couple of steps towards them, now, since he’s apparently been invited into the conversation. Since he’s decided to save Pickles from having to explain himself.

“Pickles asked me if I would come on to look at the, ah-- legal paperwork. For your record deal.”

Nathan laughs, then, he full on laughs, and he shakes his head. He drinks, though, and so Pickles takes it as a good sign.

“He’s a manager, then?”

“He’s a lawyer.”

“He’s a manager with extra paperwork, then?”

There’s quiet, for a couple of seconds. Pickles had expected this, but it doesn’t make him less uncomfortable.

“He’s cool, though. He’s-- there’s no parts where he’s, like, involved, okay? I just-- I was serious, about Magnus. He’s gonna ruin the fuckin’ band if you let him.”

Nathan presses his lips together, and he looks at Pickles, and he looks at Charles. It’s a couple of beats, but then he looks at Pickles, again.

“And the robot, he’s gonna-- you intend to save us all from the wrath of Magnus Hammersmith?” Nathan says it like a joke. Charles smiles, a little. Just barely at the very edges of his mouth.

Charles takes another cigarette out of the case in his pocket. It’s a fancy case, but it’s plain. There’s something about plain things like that that just look expensive. Charles lights his American Spirit, and he blows it out into the fog after his first puff.

“I am a  _ very  _ good lawyer.”

Nathan laughs, again, at that. Pickles likes it, that Nathan laughs, right then, because it means that Nathan gets it when Charles is trying to be funny and that Nathan doesn’t think it’s as lame and stuffy as Pickles does.

“Sure. Fuck it.”

Pickles offers another fist pump, and then takes the gin back for another turn. Nathan scoffs at him, when he hands it over, but there’s something tender in him that Pickles is grateful and a little surprised to be able to meet again.

It feels good.

* * * *

He rides on the back of Nathan’s bike while they find his van. There’s five or six bodegas in the city they have to go to, because Pickles likes to park there before he goes on his walks. Pickles has ridden on the back of a lot of motorcycles, and he’s good at it, usually. Leans into the turns, with Nathan, keeps his hands on his own thighs so that while they’re tooting around no one will shout anything at them. Nathan’s back is a big broad wall that prevents him from the way the wind braces you, if it is unfamiliar with you, as it is something harsh, but tameable. He remembers after three stops for loose cigarettes that it’s at the river docks, instead.

It feels lonely, somewhat, following Nathan back to the apartment in his own bucket seat. The uneasiness creeps back into his guts, because he’s sobered up. Traveling back up the fire escape makes his spit feel like it might be the acid instead.

Skwisgaar and Murderface are working on some basslines together when he re-enters the apartment, all sheepish, and the way they look at him makes him feel like they’re going to grill him about why he’s turned back up. They do him the immense grace of failing to ask him any questions, though, and so it’s easy for him to sit back down and offer his advice on why they should push Will into something groovier if they want to be interesting at all.

Nathan makes them all kraft mac and cheese. Pickles puts ketchup in his, and that’s the only thing they really needle him about. His mattress in the butler pantry, that night, feels like a guest room he is grateful to be able to spend the night in. He realizes, watching the ceiling and remembering the other ceiling he’d watched recently, that he doesn’t have a window in there, and that he might miss that eventually.

The sheets are soft, because they’re clean, still. Cool and cotton, on his back and his arms, bare. He’s kicked off his comforter because the humidity has steeped into the apartment and he’s blessed with the joy of a warm night. Pickles closes his eyes, and he tries to slip gently into the back of his head, where all his real thoughts run around and are prevented from terrorizing him.

He’s gotta get through them to fall asleep sober. He knows that, he has enough experience, with it.

Pickles has this... feeling... like things won’t go back to how they were. He feels like they’re all playing cards, being in this band, together, and that all of them are sitting around pretending they’re too cool to actually want to work together. He feels like they’re pretending they are too cool to be fond of eachother, even though they act that way when the walls fall down. He feels like he’s come back, now, and in doing so he’s plopped all his cards on the table and shown them that he cares, and now he’s at a disadvantage.

Maybe it isn’t a disadvantage, quite-- it’s the uneasy feeling, though. That’s where it’s coming from. When he corners it, that thought, in the little room in the back of his head, he can tell the string he’s tugged is the one that’s causing him his illness. He’s scared, a little, that the uneasiness won’t fade.

When he was married to Lacey, he knew it was over just after it had begun. She didn’t like who he really was; she liked his drugs, and his friends, and she liked being married to someone that did interviews on TV. She liked how she was taller than him, in heels, but not that he thought it was sexy how she was taller than him the rest of the time, too. He got the sense from her that she wanted badly to be a trophy wife, that she wanted to be an ultimate groupie, kind of, but that she didn’t really care who it was for.

And-- he’s not innocent there, right? He married her because she was a model. He liked her because girls like her never liked him, because he never had a shot with them. Because he was short, and weird, and because once they found out about him being trans everything would just melt to water in his hands.

That’s good-- she was like ice. She was cold, and she had all of these parts of herself that were inaccessible to him, and the more he clung to her it’s like it became inevitable that he would lose her. The fighting was probably the real reason, the fighting was probably why it was good that they didn’t stick things through. But he remembers it. He remembers it, on their honeymoon, on that water bed, closing his eyes and trying to fall asleep in the waning blessing of his high. He remembers realizing that there’s a big clock on everything, and that eventually she will get sick of the parts of him that are real and that are lonely and pathetic, and that she will leave him like everyone else has.

Love, and friendship are toxic things for him. He’s bad at them. That’s the core of it. That... hole, he has. When he lets himself have other people around him, he’s someone fated to be lonely. He’s someone fated for failure, he’s someone that has been thoroughly ruined, already. You can’t keep up a lie forever. You can’t... pretend that it isn’t there, that the bad things don’t live in the back of your head every waking second.

Ah. Ah, that’s it-- that’s why he’s been thinking of her. This is like that, isn’t it? His friendship with Nathan, his friendship with Frances. The band. These are things that are meant to be done and appreciated by a real person. But hes... not a real person. Not anymore.

He’s playing a game of pretend. He’s having fun. He needs to just be content, with that. This is another trial, another  _ thing  _ he has to do. The music is what he gets, out of it, and he has to be ready for that to be all he’s going to get out of it.

This is a thread in the tattered tapestry of his life, and it is another good thing that is fated to leave him behind. He needs to make himself be content to let it end, when it does, he needs to prepare himself for when it does. Pickles needs to make peace with the parts of himself that are not good enough, because they aren’t going anywhere-- he needs to have his fun and write his songs, while he can, so that when he’s left alone again he can be comfortable in that loneliness.

The loneliness is never comfortable, not really. It’s the little feeling in the core of his bones that makes him want to off himself, sometimes. It’s this little trickle, this little drip-drip-drip, it’s the vast misery that he knows is the very core of his life. He knows his mom saw it-- he knows that’s why she hated him so much. Why she’d kick him out, sometimes.

When Seth got grounded, he wasn’t allowed to leave the house. When Pickles got grounded, she made him sleep on the porch. He remembers it, that cold, he remembers laying there all curled up on the stoop, waiting with each passing second for her to pop out and apologize to him and tell him she’s come to her senses. That she would never want him to freeze to death out there. He remembers being scared to die, out there, and then that disappointment in her eyes when she’d unlock the front door the next morning and let him come in for some grits. He remembers learning, over and over, every time, that she only tolerated him because she’d made him, and that she couldn’t wait for him to leave her alone.

Because she saw him, you know? She saw all the thoughts in the back of his head, and she knew exactly how big of a hole he was born with, where normally a soul might go. It was like he was born, and she hated him for it, and even now he can’t blame her because fuck, you know? He hates him, too.

Pickles presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. He needs to just go to sleep. The dreams are better than this. The dreams are a hundred times better than this, because at least in there there are other people to distract him from this... montage of all his worst moments.

He’s got to be fun and entertaining tomorrow. That’ll fix it. People only like you when you’re fun and entertaining. People only stick around for a while, for a little bit longer, when they’ve got a reason to, like that. Pickles puts his arms back down, and he turns on his side.

He imagines going to a diner. He likes diners. He and Will, they’re both small town kids, they like diners. He’ll order steak and eggs, himself, and a side of corned beef hash. And the hash will be good, like it is up north. It’ll be house made for the first time he’s had in Tampa, and it’ll taste like everything else that’s been on the grill that morning. They’ll sit in the smoking section, and he’ll split the rest of his Newports with the guys, and they’ll all just... have a good time.

Pickles pulls the sheets closer, up towards his chin, rams them under his armpit so he feels swaddled, a little. He focuses in on that, like a memory of something that hasn’t happened. They’ll all just have a good time.

* * * *

_ It’s snowing. He’s sitting at the DQ after it closed. He takes a hit, and passes the joint back to Leif. Leif is talking about something, about any number of things Leif used to talk to him about, but Pickles has drowned it out and it just sounds like adults in Charlie Brown cartoons. Pickles wishes they had more friend cheese curds. He wishes the dairy queen was open. _

__ _ Pickles looks down, and he knows he’s a kid again. He remembers an almost feral discomfort he’d felt, at this age, when his body was changing in ways he’d hated and in ways his mother always seemed to want to bring up to jab at him. He realizes, after a few seconds, that Leif has stopped talking, and so he looks up at him. _

__ _ Leif’s face is a thumb, but his haircut is recognizable. Pickles remembers when Leif had given himself this mohawk-- all uneven. Pickles remembers Leif’s dad had made him shave it. Pickles knows that in two weeks, Leif is going to try and kiss him, and then instead break down crying because his parents are sending him to military school. It’s a weird memory. Pickles doesn’t think about it, often. Pickles tries to move so he can walk away, because in harmless dreams, because in dreams where he knows he’s dreaming, he usually can go do something else. _

__ It’s just fucked up, you know? You can get away with anything. I wish I had your mom.

_ Ah. Ah. So that’s why he’s here. Pickles takes the joint back, and he takes a long pull and says what he did, back then. _

__ You don’t,  _ Pickles tells him. Pickles cringes, because his voice is so high. He remembers he had cringed back then, too. _

__ Fuck you. You don’t know what it’s like. _ Pickles laughs at him, for saying that. Pickles takes the joint back from him, and he takes a long draw. He holds it, in his lungs, and puts it out on the picnic table so that he can tuck it back behind his ear. When he goes to get up, he can’t move his feet. When he looks down, he notices they’re frozen to the seat. That’s... new. _

__ _ Pickles stands up, on the picnic table, and he throws himself forward like he can break the ice. Instead he just falls down onto the cold, frozen ground, and gets to walk around barefoot in the slush. Lovely. Pickles loves his brain. He knows exactly what it feels like, too, because he and Seth used to prove how tough they were to their friends by walking around barefoot outside. Leif keeps saying the things he said to Pickles, back then, and he doesn’t react while Pickles walks away from him. When Pickles looks back, he sees himself there, thirteen. His hair hacked off, his face soft. He looks at himself, in the eyes, and it makes him feel so sad. He doesn’t know why, but he feels like he’s seeing a different person entirely. _

__ _ It feels like he’s watching his life happen to someone else, and for some reason, this person who’s him and not him is going through all those same things. And he feels like they don’t... deserve it, the way he feels like he earned it. _

__ You can leave, you know,  _ he tells her, this teenager, sitting before him. _

__ You’re going to leave,  _ he says. But she just looks at him, some more, and he realizes she isn’t looking right at him. She can’t hear him and all the things he’d like to tell her. He realizes that’s how he himself had looked over the frozen landscape of his home town, he realizes that this is part of the memory, too. _

__ _ It feels so strange, seeing himself like that. _

_ * _ __ _ * _ __ _ * _ __ _ * _

When he wakes up, he realizes he’s fallen back into the pit. That... familiar pit, the loneliness. He can’t go and act like himself because his dreams have managed to drag him into the black hole, again. Pickles wakes up, and he looks up at the ceiling, and he wishes he could do some kind of a catharsis. He wishes he wanted to go get drunk or start a fight, but those things require him to get up and move around.

Pickles listens to someone open their bedroom door and enter the kitchen. He listens to them go into the fridge, and when they start humming, he realizes it’s Skwisgaar. He listens to Skwisgaar make some breakfast, presumably. There’s some clinking, the sound of something dry, pouring. There’s a pouring sound. Pickles imagines probably it is cereal.

Pickles imagines that he’s dead, that his guts are all out around him. Pickles imagines himself like that, and imagines that he’s a corpse now and that’s why he can’t move. It’s better than imagining how he really is, just... depressed. He gets distracted thinking about it and when he comes back into reality Skwisgaar is gone, and the apartment feels empty again.

Maybe that’s a song-- that you’re still awake, when you’re dead. That you are conscious in your corpse, like a ghost, trapped, and you can feel it, all of the parts of you decaying. He doesn’t know how that would turn into lyrics. Maybe it could start with that bassline they’d been writing the day before-- but slow it down. Have Murderface come in and play it for-- he goes over it in his head. It sounds like thirty seconds, probably. That’s the preface, it sets the mood. If the rest of the show is all fast and heavy like they play it, a little interlude where it’s just a bass solo would be spooky. Heavy.

The rhythm guitar could come in after. Everyone, one at a time, trickling in slow while Nathan stands at the mic like a specter. And then, suddenly, cut out and he just screams. It’s just noise, it’s just this chaotic noise loose in the universe like everything and nothing. Pickles feels some restlessness building up, in his chest, and so he turns on his side.

The bassline stays the same, but builds up, after the screaming. Nathan can keep screaming, roaring, no lyrics-- make it hard to listen to, make it hurt. Keep the guitar high,fast, those thoughts above the chaos.  _ What’s going to happen to me? What the fuck is happening? _ Like that. The drums, crashing, discordant. Pickles feels some energy coming back to him, suddenly, at the idea of playing it. The crashing, the grand crashing.

Ah, maybe this is good. The thing that gets Pickles out of bed, finally, finally, is that he wants to pitch it to Nathan. He wants to wake Nathan up like a hibernating bear, again, and tell him about it. Because there’s nothing better, there’s nothing better on earth for Pickles, than the way he knows that Nathan will look at him, right then.


	6. Lithium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a big chapter-- Magnus appears in person, Frances and Pickles have a talk about things they have been avoiding, and Nathan and Pickles start down on perhaps the grandest misconception of them all.

The first practice with Magnus isn’t as bad as Pickles had anticipated. But that’s how it is, with Magnus Hammersmith; he comes in like he’s a sun shower. He tells the right jokes, and he says the right cool and interesting things, and he gives off this air of majesty and mystery, like suddenly he’s the main character even in other people’s lives. He looks at Pickles strangely, because he always has, like they’ve got some secret agreement between the two of them and he’s waiting for Pickles to pay up on it. Like he’s the devil, and Pickles had met him at a crossroads and made a deal that’s running out on time. Like Magnus has got the threat of a hurricane in the pit where his soul might go, if he had one, and Pickles had better remember that. It makes Pickles uneasy, because it’s too easy.

Magnus plays rhythm well. He was lead, when Pickles played with him before, but Magnus pays Skwisgaar the right compliments on his riffs. Magnus says he likes the music that Nathan has written, and he says it, like that, that  _ Nathan _ wrote it, just like how he used to say  _ I like what we’ve written, here,  _ about songs Pickles had composed all on his own. There’s something to it, a robbery. A secret agreement, maybe, but one that Pickles isn’t a part of any more.

After practice Magnus takes his expensive guitar and he puts it up in his sedan, and then he invites them all out. Like it’s an accident, like he wasn’t planning to, but Pickles knows him better than to think he hasn’t planned to. Pickles sees and hears it in the lilt of his voice, in the way his eyes slit, that it’s all manufactured. Like everything about the person Magnus pretends to be is.

Pickles rides on Nathan’s bike, with him, and the rest of them pile into the sedan beside Magnus’ amp. Pickles wants to say something, to Nathan, about it, but he’s petrified he’s being crazy. He knows, knows, that if he says anything, then Magnus will start saying things, too. And Magnus Hammersmith is more cool and entertaining than Pickles is, by a long shot, and if it’s going to be one of them sticking around, Pickles knows who that would be.

Pickles pushes it down.

The dive is loud, that night. It’s a comfort. The voices of forty or fifty men circle around Pickles and filter into some kind of grey noise in the air around them. He lets it flow through him, wash over him, as his face is colored with drink. He’s been ordering bottom shelf whiskey, neat. Lukewarm as it slides, oaky, down his throat. He can taste the burn of it, the sting of it, on his breath. He imagines maybe this is how fire-eaters do it.

Oh, but then the fire would be going in, right? It would be entering his body? Fuck, doesn’t that hurt? He’s burned the back of his throat with a bong, before, he’s done it several times. He can’t imagine how it must feel to do something like that with something hotter than steam.

Nathan says something. Pickles can’t fucking hear what it is, over the noise, he can’t pick Nathan’s voice out in the roar of everything else. It turns out to be a joke, because all of the other guys are laughing. Pickles laughs a little, just to be a part of it. It feels bleak. It feels heavy, and bleak. When he looks over, Nathan is looking right at Magnus and they’re sitting together, all chummy, they’re bumping shoulders and laughing and they look like friends. The sounds and the stuffiness and the body heat of the crowd around them feels oppressive then, suddenly, like it was a rock and it didn’t fall on Pickles until he noticed it was there.

Fuck. Fuck, he’s got to get out of here. Pickles stands up, and he shouts, “I gotta piss!” and no one acknowledges him. He doesn’t know why he wants so badly for all of them to acknowledge that he has to piss, but he does, and it hurts a little that they don’t. He’s being a bitch about this. He needs to grow the fuck up, he needs to stop.

Pickles weaves his way through all the too-big men and finds his way out into the alley. It’s nice, out there. Colder than when they’d arrived, and there’s no one joining him, so he gets to be alone in the still of the air. Pickles pats his pockets for a lighter, and he doesn’t find one. It figures, he doesn’t find one. It’s emblematic of how his life is going right now. He leans against the wall behind him, feels the rough of the cool brick on his back.

Pickles closes his eyes, just for a second. Maybe if he just held the cigarette, it would remind him of smoking. That way, maybe he could get that feeling, he gets, maybe he could get a little placebo rush and clear out some of the gunk in his head that is causing him this bleak fog. Pickles pulls his last cigarette out from behind his ear, and he holds it. He looks at it, then, in his hand. He’s bored, and he doesn’t want to be bored, but he is. Is that what he’s meant to do, then? Be bored and suffer, or be with Magnus, and suffer?

The door beside him opens. He’s behind it, and from the angle, whoever has opened it can’t see him. He figures it’s someone else coming out for a breather, and then he sees the fingers curled around the frame. Long nails. Rings, on rings, on rings, like whoever is wearing them would like others to think he’s some kind of a fucking warlock, or a vampire, at least.

“You got a light, dude?”

Magnus peeks out, and he seems pleased. Like a cat, he’s pleased, his eyelids all heavy as he smiles all wide. It’s fake, Pickles knows better than to believe it. Magnus closes the door behind himself.

“Were you going to sit out here and wait for me all night?”

“I wasn’t waitin’ for you.”

Lame. Lame response. Pickles isn’t as smart as Magnus is, and Magnus seems smug to have proved it. Everything’s a test, with him; everything’s a little game, where he wins and proves he’s better than you in all of the little ways. Magnus produces a zippo from the pocket of his open shirt. Pickles goes to grab it from him, and Magnus draws his hand back quick to taunt him. Magnus laughs at him. Pickles makes a face.

“If you’re not gonna let me use it, why’d you fuckin’ take it out?”

Magnus snorts, and flicks the lid open, starting the flame. He wants Pickles to lean forward like a little bitch and let Magnus light his cigarette for him. Pickles doesn’t like that. Pickles doesn’t know what it would prove, to Magnus, what it would mean, but he knows it has to be something. Pickles spends a few seconds giving him a dirty look. Magnus won’t give in, because he never does. Pickles leans forward, and obstinately accepts the light. Magnus lets him finish, and then clicks the lighter closed while it’s still up in his face so that Pickles will flinch. Magnus laughs at him, for flinching, and then leans against the wall with him.

“Don’t fuck Nathan,” Magnus says, all easy.

Pickles chokes on his smoke. He should have expected something like that, because Magnus has certainly said things to him like that, before, accused him of things like that. It’s one of the main reasons he’d been trying to leave Bayou of Blood, even before the things that happened with Frances. He’s done himself the disservice of getting unused to it.

“Jesus! I’m not gonna! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Magnus snorts at him, in that way, he does. Like he’s some ancient creature perturbed with the naive scamp that has traipsed into his den. That has unexpectedly encroached upon his pile of gold. That doesn’t know it is going to be incinerated, for that crime.

“He knows, you know.  _ About  _ you.”

“Yeah, I wonder who fuckin’ told him.”

Magnus laughs at him, again, all dark and in his throat. Pickles recognizes it from his dreams. He hates to think of it, he hates remembering being afraid of Magnus. Magnus wears his nails long, but he can’t dig them into Pickles’ thigh without a fight out here. The only Magnus that can do that is the one living in his head rent free.

“We’re just in a band together. Don’t fuckin’-- don’t make it all weird.”

“You’re the one who’s being  _ weird _ , man. Out here, holding unlit cigarettes. Don’t you have asthma?”

“Yeah, and I’m lookin’ to die a little sooner just to get out of this conversation. You got any more smokes? You owe me a couple packs. You’re a bastard like that.”

“I quit.”

Magnus says it, and he’s all sly. Pickles knows Magnus must expect Pickles to piece out some hidden meaning in what he’s saying, like it's some parable of a great and terrible revenge. Magnus seems pleased that he’s wormed his way into the back of Pickles’ head and rendered him silent. Pickles resolves to say something.

“I really like this shit we’re doin’, okay? I like him ‘cause he’s a good musician. I’m stickin’ around to make some good music. I won’t forgive you if you fuck up a good thing.”

“You haven’t once forgiven me for anything. You didn’t have to hire a lawyer.”

Pickles breathes out some smoke. So Magnus... knows about Charles. He can tell two things by how he’s brought it up-- that it bothers him, that Pickles is suspicious, and that he wants Pickles to know and remember that Magnus can see all of his moves. It’s like Magnus is trying to force what they’re doing into being a game of chess, and he’s telling Pickles where all his pieces are and what all his options are, and he won’t listen that Pickles isn’t playing anymore. Pickles knows he must be mad, that Pickles isn’t playing anymore. Magnus doesn’t look mad, though.

He flicks his cigarette, and watches some of the ash float down. He never liked it, like this, watching Magnus try to gamify all of Pickles’ relationships the way Magnus gamifies his own. When he looks at Magnus again, Magnus has stopped smiling. The curls of his hair frame his too-sharp face like dark curtains.

“If there’s one thing I know, dude? Is if you don’t like somethin’ I’m up to, I had better keep at it.”

“How’s Frances?”

Ah. Ah, Magnus made a mistake, there. He’s mis-stepped. Pickles looks at the dumpster across from them. It’s empty, looks like. Pickles wonders what day they take the trash, around here. He’s glad there’s room leftover for his supposed morals.

“The bruises been gone a long time now. I dunno if you saw ‘em. Looked like somebody tried to kill her.”

Magnus hums. Pickles doesn’t want to look at him, because he can’t imagine the face Magnus is making would make him feel any better.

“She never would have really died.”

Fuck. Fuck, that makes Pickles mad. That makes Pickles so fucking angry. All he can feel is that moment of shame from the last time he’d seen her-- from when they’d dropped acid, together, and he’d brought out what might have been the worst moment of her life in front of a bunch of people she didn’t know. He imagines how angry he would have been, if she had done something like that to him. He’s angry at  _ himself _ , for it, because she has never once done anything like that to him. She was a good friend to him, almost his entire life, and he did something to her that night that he thinks might be unforgivable. He can’t imagine why else she would have left so suddenly, because he’s drunk, and he’s miserable, and he’s self-centered in his misery.

“You’re so lame, you know that, Magnus? I think you’re the lamest guy I know.”

Magnus snorts, a little, hearing that. Pickles imagines him saying ‘Likewise’ or something else stupid and game-y, but instead Magnus is just quiet, a long while.

“If you ever treat a girl like that again, I’ll kill you. I’m promisin’ right now, you’ll be done.”

“You don’t know what happened.”

“I do.”

“You  _ don’t.  _ Did she tell you what she gave me, that night?”

She didn’t. Pickles knows Magnus gets into some bad shit, some heavy shit. Pickles has stayed away from needles because he doesn’t want to just go do heroin again. He doesn’t know how he quit heroin, that first time, and so he knows for sure if he gets on it again he won’t ever be able to stop. He knows there’s not a better high than he had, that first time.

It’s like a core memory, for him. If he closes his eyes, he can remember every second of it so well it’s like he can  _ feel it  _ happening again. It’s like he’s back there, with Tony, like he’s not some backwater kid anymore, and he’s not some failed person, anymore. It’s like he got those two hours to feel safe, and warm, and he doesn’t have to remember the aftermath of how he learned not to chase those feelings again.

He never did shit like that, with Magnus. He took pills and he did tabs and he did a hundred other things, in that dingy, dirty apartment, but he never did anything he thought he couldn’t come back from, like that. He knows that in Magnus’ free time, he didn’t abide by those same rules.

“It doesn’t matter,” Pickles tells him, even though he can already tell that this conversation is getting in between his skin and his flesh. That Magnus has found a scab on him, and pried it up, and found a home in his viscera, like he always seems to want to.

Magnus scoffs at him, again. Pickles imagines it as a bubble under the skin of his arm, and he’s certain for a second it means death.

“You should ask her, then,” Magnus says back. Too quick. When Pickles looks up at Magnus, Magnus has that same look on his face-- like he knows something Pickles doesn’t, like he won’t tell him, like he likes the power, of that, of secrets.

“What you were on?”

“If it matters.”

* * * *

Pickles is back at the bar. He doesn’t want to admit it, but wondering what happened, that night, it takes over him. It’s all that clunks around in his dumb little head, in the empty spot where a brain goes.

He remembers seeing her, after. It had to have been a few days, right? The bruises on her neck were blooming up purple. Yellow, at the edges. He’d never seen something like that, not on her or anyone, not in real life. She wouldn’t tell him what had happened, she didn’t want to talk about it. She’d given him a bunch of free weed to just smoke and lay around and keep her company.

He’d always wondered why she did that-- if she didn’t feel safe. He’d thought she’d tried to hang herself, or something, and then Magnus skipped town for a long while. She didn’t have to tell him that it was Magnus who did it to her, those pieces were easy to put together, once he’d thought of them at the same time. He wondered if she thought he would come back to hurt her. He wondered if Magnus had ever done anything like that before, but Pickles didn’t notice, being too busy being an idiot. He wondered if she just didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts, in her own head.

When he’s gotten in a bad way, and he’s been around guys he shouldn’t have, and he’s been hurt, for it-- he always felt like that. Like he wanted to drown in other people, because if he didn’t, he’d just be alone, and then probably he’d turn into mold in the back of his van and never get to party ever again.

Pickles breathes out, and he drinks more. He loses track of his vision, of his senses, over time. He loses the worried thoughts in the liquor, and it’s good, it’s really good, it feels good, to do that. Like then he’s just him, in his body, and all these people he can’t undo things with aren’t in his head with him. There’s no Magnus, no Nathan, no Frances, there’s nothing to be upset about because he’s poisoned himself past the point of knowing about it.

He’s swimming. He realizes he’d closed his eyes, at some point, because he opens them and he sees the display bottles of liquor across from him, swimming around with him and the bobbing of his head. He wishes he could reach for them, all of them, from where he’s seated, that he was alone in a motel to die with them and without the burden of a watchful bartender. He’s got this vague sense of where he is, just enough that he knows there are things he needs to avoid. He feels like he should try and be good-natured, and like he should pretend to have a good time, or he might regret it, but he can’t remember why. He doesn’t know if he can say anything, anymore, because it’ll just come out as whines.

There’s some impact on his arm. It feels like it takes him a full hour to turn his head all the way around. Fuck, he’s trashed. Nathan’s face is all close to his face, and it makes him jerk his own head back, and he loses his balance. Nathan catches him by the arm, but Pickles doesn’t realize that, at first, and instead he has a few seconds where he thinks probably (definitely) he and Nathan have some kind of a telekinetic brain connection that they just discovered. He laughs about it, and his voice sounds all funny in his head.

“Let’s go home!” Nathan shouts at him. Home, home, ah-- is it home for him, now? Does Nathan consider it home, being with Pickles? Something about that makes Pickles smile. Something about that makes all of his misery fall away for just a second, to think about and dwell in, and he smiles wider.

“I love you, dude!” Pickles shouts back into Nathan’s face.

Nathan looks funny, about it. His eyebrows kind of quirk together. It’s not a good face. Pickles wants to say something else, to undo it-- he doesn’t know why he’s so worried, but he feels like he should be worried, right? That’s what he’d do if he wasn’t smashed right now, right?

Nathan lets go of his arm, and Pickles promptly falls backwards, off of his barstool. The ground doesn’t hurt so bad, though, because Pickles’ joints are loose, because he’s too drunk to process it properly. Nathan helps him up. Pickles is reminded that there are other people once Nathan’s got his arm looped around Pickles’ back and he has to look at his bandmates faces.

At Magnus’ face. Right. Right, fuck, Magnus is there. Magnus smiles, at him, smug somehow. Pickles can’t remember why he’s smug. It still makes him feel weird. Pickles closes his eyes and lets his head bob down, a bit, so he can collect more of the thoughts that fell out of him when he hit the floor.

They talk to eachother. Pickles has never liked that feeling, being unable to pick out the conversation when it might be about him. He blinks, a couple of times, and then twists a bit so that he can get out of Nathan’s arm. He’s not swimming, anymore, he’s drowning. He’s seasick.

“Oh, fuck--” he says, just in time to make everyone look at him while he leans on his knees and vomits.

* * * *

Pickles doesn’t remember getting back to the apartment. He doesn’t remember much past his conversation with Magnus. He can’t get into that now, though-- because he smells terrible, and the entire world is too-bright and throbbing. Pickles blinks, bleary.

He’s got to eat something. He’s not been this hungover in a while.

It takes him at least two eons to get up. There are at least two full extinction events, in that time. At least a million species, boom, dead, in that time. His mouth is dry, and it tastes terrible, and ultimately it is more uncomfortable to lay in bed with it like that than it is to get up and fix it. He makes it to the bathroom without having to run into anyone and, God forbid, be forced to talk to them. He thinks that probably he does not have any brain cells left for conversation. He drinks from the sink like a dog. He has a piss that smells like pure hell. He thinks of Magnus, who has become a regular rent-free tenant in his head.

Pickles goes out into the kitchen, and discovers he is no longer alone. He’s got some water in his cells, and it is only with that added fortitude that he is able to tolerate Skwisgaar daring to look at him. Pickles goes into the fridge. There aren’t any eggs. He could cry, for the lack of eggs in that fridge. He presses his head to the closed freezer door as a way to comfort himself for a few seconds. The agony, of having to now eat cereal.

Pickles grabs the milk-- the cow milk, the good milk-- and then he looks up to see what his options are.

The inhumanity. These beasts, he lives with, these bastards. These absolute  _ douchebags.  _ There’s no cereal. Pickles offers a groan, and then he opens the top of the milk and just drinks from it directly. Skwisgaar offers a “Eugh” in response, and he says something in Swedish that Pickles chooses not to process. Pickles gets enough milk in his body that he thinks he might throw up, again, but that’s calories. That’s fat, and protein. That’s what his body needs to live. He breathes out, and puts it back. Puts it down. Carbohydrates. He needs carbs. Bread. He could eat half a loaf, probably, and he picks up the bag with that intention.

“You ams becomes some type of animal, in the night?”

Pickles gives him a withering look. Pickles makes direct eye contact with him, and tells him, “You have blonde eyelashes,” as though it is an insult, and then he balls up a piece of wonderbread in his fist and puts the whole thing in his mouth.

“You am goings to gets fat, likes this.”

“I fuckin’ hope so,” Pickles tells him back.

Skwisgaar breathes out, and then leans back against the countertop. Pickles sees his too-big hands spread on the counter behind him. He thinks maybe Skwisgaar is going to boost himself up and sit on it, and then he doesn’t, and Pickles elects to completely hold it against him. Skwisgaar breathes out, again, and looks at Pickles.

It’s pity. Pickles sees it, and hates it, immediately.

“You am... real angries, recently.”

“So you wanna talk, then? That’s what this is about, you wanna have a little talk?”

Skwisgaar sighs, since he’s apparently full of those, and then he rolls his head around over his shoulders. Skwisgaar is spacing the conversation out, and Pickles can tell he’s trying to prompt Pickles to keep talking by keeping quiet himself. It’s normally an effective tactic, but it just makes Pickles angry, right then.

“I thinks... ja. I likes to talk to you, Pickle. Bein’s you friend, likes that.”

God. This sucks. He remembers why he was supposed to be cool and entertaining-- because it’s this, if you aren’t. Because people who want to feel like they are good people feel bad for you, and they want to try and fix you, and when they can’t that’s when they finally leave. It’s Skwisgaar’s fault for being stubborn.

“Are you?”

Skwisgaar looks at him, his brow furrowed. His hair and his skin are kind of the same color, and so Pickles mainly sees it in the wrinkle in his forehead. Skwisgaar doesn’t know what he means.

“Are you my _ friend _ ?”

Skwisgaar lets his lips part, and Pickles expects him to look away, and he doesn’t.

“It am... okay with me, you knows that? What you am likes this?”

“So everyone knows, now? That’s fuckin’ lovely. That’s just great.”

Pickles had assumed immediately that Skwisgaar meant that he was trans, and he thinks it’s a fair assumption. He thinks probably Magnus is going around, telling everyone that, maybe that’s what they were all laughing about together at the bar while Pickles was being an upstanding, virtuous drunk. Magnus likes secrets, but Pickles has also known Magnus to enjoy hurting people with secrets more than he likes keeping them. Skwisgaar still looks confused, and so Pickles figures he’s off the mark. Which is also just so lovely, because he knows he’s being crazy, and he can’t stop.

“Look, dude, I’m sorry. I just-- I hate that guy. Magnus. I really fuckin’ hate him. I don’t know how to tell you how much I hate him.”

“So-- and you amen’t ables to gets angry with me for asking you these, but-- why am that? Magnus seem to bes a pretty cool guy, to me.”

“You don’t know him like me, dude, he’s-- he’s just a bad guy, He gets you all close, and cozy, right? And then he just stabs you, right in the back.”

Skwisgaar hums. That’s when he finally does look away. Pickles feels like Skwisgaar is picking things out of what he is saying that he didn’t mean, and he doesn’t like it. There’s some element to it, though, that feels... desperate, also. Like he’d very much like to be understood for once. Like he shouldn’t have to ramble and ramble for anyone to get close to what he’s talking about.

“So he stabs you in the back, ja? He does something to you that am really that bad, that you ams skill angry with him, all of the time?”

Pickles breathes out really hard, and eats another bread ball in lieu of responding. Skwisgaar laughs at him for it, and it’s the first time in a little while that he likes it, that someone laughs at him. Pickles puts the rest of the bread away.

“I know, uh-- I’m self-aware, here, okay? It’s like I’m just watching all this shit crumble around me, because  _ of me _ , and I’m fuckin’ mad about it.”

Skwisgaar hums.

“I really,  _ really  _ wanna be in Dethklok, you know? But I also really, really,  _ really  _ don’t want to be in a band with that guy.”

Skwisgaar is quiet, a little while. He’s spacing the conversation out again, and Pickles can tell. Pickles is if not legally, at least morally, obligated to be a huge obstinate asshole about it and refuse to continue spilling his guts. It’s a too-long silence before Skwisgaar starts talking.

Pickles had expected it to be longer, before Skwisgaar gave in.

“You ams hears this... scorpion and the frong?”

Pickles sucks his teeth. He doesn’t want to admit to not knowing something. Skwisgaar nods at him

“It’s going-- the scorpion, he makes deals with the frong, ja? He tells him, you takes me across this rivers here, and I gives to you for it a golden coin.”

“Okay.”

“And the frong, he goes-- well, I ams sure scared-y cats of you, because you can poisons me, right? And the scorpion says to him, well, I amen’t does that, or we both dies, out there. In that rivers.”

This is boring. He should have known better than to listen to this. Skwisgaar is just proselytizing to him about fables. Magnus is a lot worse than a scorpion. Magnus is a magnitude of at least twelve scorpions. Pickles wets his lips to say something, and Skwisgaar puts a hand up to tell him to shut up about it. At least he’s annoyed, now, more than bored.

“And then he ams does it. Scorpion, halfways, he betray that frong. Stabs him, real hard, brutals, ja? Kills him, and am drowns himself.”

“So, what? I shouldn’t trust Magnus, ‘cause he’s gonna poison me? I didn’t need you to tell me that, dude, I already know that.”

“No. You ams not the frong, Pickle. You ams the scorpion, here. Takes you ride across the river, with hims. That guy. Gets to where you am going, gives him you gold coin, and forgets about him-- because if you stabbing him, both of you dies.”

Pickles scoffs.

“That’s the dumbest shit I ever heard, dude.”

Skwisgaar smiles at him, though, rather than getting mad.

“Ja, maybes. Jusk-- be nice to him, ja? Lets us gets this record deal. If he am does anything that bad to you, after that-- we gets rid of him.”

Pickles presses his lips together. He thinks that’s meant to comfort him, he thinks Skwisgaar will want him to smile, and so he puts one on for pretend. He reminds himself, hey-- he’s told himself the same thing a hundred times. Cool and entertaining. Fun. If he just gripes in response to Skwisgaar’s offer of friendship, he’s not being any of those things.

If he wants to stick around, he’s got to do his part.

“Yeah,” he says, wholly unconvinced.

* * * *

When Pickles left Snakes N Barrels, he went directly into rehab. It was a nice one, it was one for rich people, like him. Connecticut, upstate. There was a swimming pool he liked, and girls who pretended to know more about him than they did, which he liked more. He stayed there for three months, and then he moved into the city in a small apartment on the water, and spent his royalties checks on the cheap rent.

Frances had been one of the remnants of his life that he’d left behind. He was eighteen, when he left California. He was twenty-two when he saw her again on that other coast. He’d felt so strange, seeing her-- like he didn’t know her anymore. He’d been nervous and his skin had felt too jumpy, and he’d been scared that he was going to buy heroin from her. He’d been scared that she’d try to sell it to him, and then he’d really die with her, one night, like he’d always imagined he would while he was still a kid.

He didn’t find out that she sold weed until a couple of months later, after she’d given him plugs a couple of times and told him even more that the only thing from her old life she missed was the long talks he used to have, with her. It felt good, by then, it felt natural. He never told her how often he’d dreamed, in rehab, that really they must have ODed in a motel somewhere and now he is in hell. He met her girlfriend. It felt good, to find out she was gay, because suddenly it felt like all of these things he knew about her clicked. Suddenly she wasn’t just one more connection he’d fucked up, and he got to enjoy seeing her be happy.

Seeing her again, now-- it’s harder than it was, then. Because back then, he’d only just imagined that he wronged her, and this time he really, genuinely had. This time he isn’t some lost puppy, turning back up at her door-- he’s an adult dog that’s gone and bitten her.

He remembers how he felt, on the fire escape. All awkward. Worried his  _ friends _ would be the ones that would ruin everything, when really it turned out, like it always does, that he himself is good enough at that task that he doesn’t need any additional help.

She pulls him into a hug, first thing. He can probably count on one hand the number of times that she’s hugged him. Her hair, curly, fried from recent bleach, is scratchy and lovely on his cheek. Frances smells like cigarettes and coconut sunscreen. He can tell she’s been out, having fun, rather than lying in miserable wait like he’d imagined.

“I’m sorry,” he says, simple, into the pit where her neck becomes her shoulder. She doesn’t say anything back to him. She squeezes him, a little, and then pulls back, and he realizes he’s flushing when she looks at him. Frances holds him by his biceps, gentle, like girls who have kissed him have in the past. It feels... tender. He feels like he doesn’t deserve it.

“Pickles-- it’s okay. I’m glad you’re okay. Thank you.”

It feels good to hear. He’s glad, hearing it. He’s happy in that way that makes you want to cry, sometimes, too.

“Your hair looks nice,” he tells her, because he can’t think of anything else to say. She laughs at him.

* * * *

Pickles forgot how red Frances’ eyes get, when she smokes. It’s a special occasion. Blair rolls on her back, her legs upended over the back of their very nice couch. He expects her to go ‘guhhh’, but she doesn’t. Her eyes seem sharper than usual, even if it isn’t pointed at him.

“So they really put him in without asking, then?” Frances asks him.

“Tell me about the ‘frong’ again, I don’t get it,” Blair says, like it’s an answer. Frances laughs, a little, and it’s a good sound. It’s a sound Pickles likes. It’s always the same tones, warbling at the top of her throat. She’s got a deep voice on her, Frances, but her laugh is like birds singing, like the sun coming out after living through a difficult night.

“The blonde one.”

“Who?”

“He’s horny”

“Ohhhhhh,” Blair says, and nods sagely, as though that clarifies anything. Her beanie falls to the floor, and Frances laughs, again, like music, leaning forward and picking it up so that she can drop it on Blair’s stomach.

“I don’t-- I know I ain’t gotta say this to you, right?”

Frances cocks her head at him. She’s funny and dumb, when she’s high. He’s only known her to be sad, high, and he doesn’t want to say something to make her be sad, now. Pickles presses his lips together.

“Magnus is a bad fuckin’ guy. I don’t want him just... hangin’ around. I don’t know how to just be okay with that.”

Frances hums. Pickles is glad she doesn’t look sad. He realizes right then that she has real eyebrows, now-- and she didn’t used to then. Just dark eye makeup, shaved brows, and maybe that’s why he always got a haunted impression from her. Frances tucks her hands behind her head, and relaxes down further into the couch.

“So don’t be, then. Stay mad, little funny man.”

Blair gets to snorting and giggling, at that, and it makes Frances smile in a different way than she’s ever smiled at Pickles. Pickles watches her watch Blair a few seconds, and then he’s caught off guard when her heavy-lidded gaze drifts on back to him.

“You don’t have to worry about me, okay? Just be safe yourself. You’re still a kid.”

“I’m  _ twenty-four _ .”

Frances hums at him, again, closing her eyes while she leans her head back against the hands she’s piled up over the back of her long neck.

“Yeah, well. You’re still a kid  _ inside _ . You’re exactly the same as when I knew you.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean, dude?”

“You’re still carrying around the same hurt, man. When you wear it all on your sleeve like that, the Magnus Hammersmiths can see it too easy.”

Pickles doesn’t know how this turned into... that. He’d been mad at anyone else who had seen how messed up he was, the last few days, but Frances is different. Frances is the only person who knows the whole truth, about Pickles, who knows everything. Who sees all the way through him and likes what she’s found.

He feels a lot of the time like she’s the only person he can really talk to that also does him the great favor of making any goddamn sense when she responds.

“Just have some fun, for me. With those boys.”

Pickles breathes out, and slumps down in his living chair. He’s being obstinate, about it.

“And be safe,” she finishes, closing her eyes again. The breath out she takes seems to collapse her like she’s one of those vacuum lock storage bags. It feels good, to see her like this-- to see her relax. He hadn’t expected that. He likes it, to see her less hurt about things than she was a few weeks prior. He likes that she has this whole life, outside of him and the dumb shit he does, and that the worst thing he’s done to her so didn’t seem to hurt her that bad.

“Why’d you leave?” he asks. She opens her eyes to look at him, again, and he sees a glimmer of it there before she blinks. The great big sad that she shares with him, the other big sads that she’s never told him about. All of the many things she hasn’t said to him, because she didn’t ever need him to hear them. Because she has someone else, for that.

“Because I didn’t want to be there anymore.”

Blair makes a sour face, when she hears Frances. Pickles thinks probably that Blair has noticed something in her even voice that Pickles hasn’t. He watches Frances look down at her, he watches Frances let one of her hands drift down towards Blair on the couch so that Blair can hold it. He watches Blair’s face relax again.

He’s glad for Frances, that Frances has that-- but he’s also jealous, in a way. The only person who ever seemed to see what he means before he has to explain himself is Magnus, and Magnus only ever used it to hurt him. He wishes, just once, that he could be  _ seen _ that way, and have that person still be kind to him. He’s being stupid. He’s being lonely for a good relationship, which is something he is pretty sure he is not capable of, and he’s comparing it to toxic and bad friendships with toxic and bad people because that’s the only time he’s ever felt kinship with anybody. Healthy people don’t like to look at the shadow of pain and misery in the back of your head, they don’t want to know about all of the terrible things that you’ve experienced and done and felt, they don’t want to dig in deep in there and break you up in the ways you’ve become familiar with. Healthy people do dances with each other that Pickles thinks probably he can never learn.

“You never told me what happened,” he says, and he watches her, all careful. 

She looks guilty somehow. She’s never done anything to him that he thinks she should be guilty for-- especially not... now, where she’s new and different and changed. He knows she probably could have done him some good not  _ selling heroin to him _ , but he can’t make himself think that way. She was never once cruel to him, and it makes it easy to forget the things he might be angry about if he’d ever managed to become a decent person. He knows none of the times he almost died were times where  _ she _ was there. He knows she was some scared kid on the street, too, even if she was a couple of years older. That was a hard city to be alone in.

He’s never not been glad he had her.

“I don’t like to talk about it,” she says. She and Blair are still looking at each other. After a little while, Frances breathes out, and she looks back at him.

“It’s-- I don’t know how you think about it, Pickles, you were-- I shouldn’t have let you come over to see me, like that.”

“I wanted to, Fran, I want-- I wanted to be there, with you. For it.”

Frances picks up one of the fresh joints she had rolled, for all of them to share. She’s quiet, a little while, like she hasn’t heard Pickles talking. He presses his lips together. Maybe he shouldn’t have said anything-- she’s forgiven him, right? He should have just left it at that. He’s midway into wallowing when she starts talking again.

“He really scared me, Pickles.”

Her voice is all quiet. She used to talk like that, all the time, when he knew her, when he was young. She’d just say things to him, all the time. She was the only person who seemed to be worried about him when he shot up, and it’s cynical to think that it was just because she didn’t want him to die. A lot of those times, he remembers them. He’d just be fucked up and blissed out and laying down on a sofa or a bed or the floor, in whatever hotel room he’d called her to, and she’d sit there and pet his head and tell him how she was proud of him, how she saw him on TV. She’d tell him about movies or about how when she was a kid she liked to make flower crowns in the woods in the spring. Anything, anything  _ good _ , because he barely remembered any of it, and he was so happy for the attention.

She’s loud, now-- and he knows, in that moment, it’s because there’s good things for her now that she isn’t around the H, anymore. He realizes that she’s never told him about when they’d lost contact, or how she got to that place where she’d metamorphosed into someone that didn’t seem like they were fated to off themselves the way Pickles felt he himself was. Pickles takes the joint from her, when she passes it, and he takes a long hit. He takes two hits. This is hard. He’s earned it, and he knows she won’t complain about him holding on to it too long.

“I know it’s-- he asked me to get it for him, and I got it for him. I know you think of me as this person who knows everything, but I’m not. I didn’t know it could make you do that, to someone.”

“What was it?”

He remembers it, when Magnus told him to ask her--  _ does it matter _ . It makes him angry to hear the gravel of his voice in his ears, again, because he realizes that she definitely thinks that it does. He realizes that  _ she believes  _ that what happened is her own fault, that she’s scared of Magnus, that she feels guilty about it. He wants so badly, in that moment, to be able to do something about that. Pickles passes Blair the joint, and when he looks up at Frances, Frances is pressing her palms into her cheeks. Passing them in lines from the corner of her mouth to her ear. Self-soothing, maybe.

It makes him more angry.

“PCP,” she says, finally.

“Fuck,” Pickles tells her.

Pickles remembers angel dust, but by the time he started in on hard drugs horse was king. He knows it was a problem in the decade of his birth, and he’d heard about it, on the news, but he didn’t know it could make someone violent like that. He didn’t believe it, because his parents believed weed could make you a satanic cannibal, and he figured the rumors about PCP were probably the same.

“He just went crazy, I don’t know. We were-- we were in his apartment.”

She breathes out hard, and when Pickles looks at where she is holding Blair’s hand, he sees her knuckles are white. He sees she’s shaking, there, where she’s putting all her tension as it overwhelms her.

“He soaked a cigarette in it. He asked me to stick around, and he’s-- you know I didn’t like him, already, but I felt bad. I don’t know, I should have left, it’s just-- I didn’t want it to hurt him. I was worried he was going to hurt himself, the way he said it.”

Pickles doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t have anything to say, because he doesn’t want to sit there and try to fix it. He hasn’t spoken to anyone about the things that have happened to him, because he can’t, he can’t, and when in his head he imagines this scenario in reverse the best thing Frances would tell him is ‘okay.’

“Okay,” he tells her, and she nods. It’s like he’s just realized she’s still right there.

“I could tell when it kicked in. He wanted to watch a movie-- I don’t-- you know what he likes, it was one of those.”

“A scary one,” he offers, and she nods.

“And... I don’t know. I went to his bathroom. It was  _ disgusting  _ in there, but I was bored, and the movie was... gross. I came out and then he was just--”

Her voice is a warble, she’s talking too fast. He’s never seen her cry, before, and she isn’t now, but he’s afraid she will. He doesn’t want to see her like that, he doesn’t want her to feel like that. He watches Blair run her thumb over Frances’.

“He just  _ tackled me _ . It was-- I think a scarf. I’d been wearing a scarf, when I got there, and I thought--”

She takes a breath, and she’s all cold. Her face is blank, and her eyes are empty. He knows... what that’s like. He knows what she’s going to say, that feeling,  _ I thought I was going to die _ . He doesn’t need her to say it.

Blair tells her, “Hey-- I’m here.”

When Frances looks at her, Pickles wants it all to drop and for Frances to just forget what they’d been talking about. And... of course, that doesn’t happen. It seems better, though, like she’s back in her body more. Pickles breathes out.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, and she shakes her head. He can see her hand has relaxed, in Blair’s.

“No,” she tells him. “No, it’s--” she clears her throat. Her voice comes back, when she talks to him. “It’s just something that happened. It’s just something that happened to me.”

Pickles presses his lips together. He doesn’t know what to say, again. He can’t imagine himself feeling that way, he can’t imagine what it’s like not to have your whole life under the pin of your own suffering, bunched up, while everyone else moves on. He can’t imagine what he’d want her to tell him, right then.

“I’m supposed to try to talk about it, so-- don’t be sorry, Pickles.”

“That’s not a good sales technique,” he tells her, and she’s confused. He likes that, confused, because it’s better than sad.

“You should tell me you won’t forgive me unless I buy, like, a quarter pound, at least.”

Frances snorts, a little, even though she still seems shaken up. Pickles likes that. He wants desperately for her to not be in that same moment she was, a few seconds earlier.

“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe.”

* * * *

When Pickles gets home, Nathan and Skwisgaar and Will are all glued to the television watching a rented VHS copy of Ghost in the Shell. Pickles has seen it seven or eight times already, but he’s got fresh drugs to offer them from his Frances visit and he’s never sick of the plot, as well as he knows it. So, he plops down easy on the couch next to Nathan. Nathan only looks over at him when Pickles takes a cigar out of the backpack he’s been hauling a felony in and starts hollowing it out to make a blunt.

“Fuck, you’re holding?”

Pickles scoffs, a little, and looks over at him.

“Not for long. I was plannin’ on sharin’, dude.”

“Fuck yeah.”

Nathan’s attention is stolen back to the screen when some animated tits are loose. Will offers a “nice” and they all nod in agreement. Pickles puts his weed through his grinder, and then starts packing it into the cigar wrapper. It’s forty seconds or so until he is able to light up. Maybe his problem this last week is he hasn’t had any grass to level himself out. Maybe that’s why his brain is broken, and actually Frances was wrong about how he’s still fucked up about the same shit. Maybe everything will just be fine, as long as he keeps supplying her weed to all his friends. It feels good, thinking like that. It also feels like he’s putting something he won’t even look at into yet another box in the back of his head. 

Hey-- maybe they will all get so high they wipe the very existence of Magnus Hammersmith from their collective memory, and Pickles thereby won’t have to worry about it anymore. Pickles hits his blunt first, because, well-- it’s his, and he’d like to get started on bolstering that wishful thinking.

He blows it out of his nose, all slow, and then passes it to Nathan. Nathan, predictably, copies him, and has much larger nostril blow out due to his impressively sized schnozz. Pickles laughs at him, a little, and offers him a smile. He expects one in return, if he’s lucky. Instead Nathan just kind of scoffs at him. It seems... embarrassed, a little. Like there’s something in Nathan’s oversized frame that’s a bit uncomfortable with him, and Pickles doesn’t know what it is, and since he’s high it’s interesting instead of stomach churning.

Almost as interesting as the cybernetic, badass anime babe that has taken over the screen and also Pickles’ entire consciousness for at least seven full seconds, wiping out all of his other thoughts because like every time he has watched this movie, it is the coolest thing he has ever seen.

Skwisgaar takes his hit, and then Pickles intercepts the blunt before it can be passed to Will. Murderface whines about it, predictably, but Pickles doesn’t give in. Because, you know-- he’s healthy Pickles, he’s cool Pickles. He’s not going to let Murderface get so smacked he lies on the carpet and moans for three hours again.

It’s Murderface who’s the kid, here. Not Pickles.

They pass the blunt around some more. It feels easy, it feels good. It feels warm, like before all the drama started. It feels like everything might actually just be fine. Better than fine, maybe, if Pickles can keep embarrassing Nathan just by looking at him.

Nathan’s not the type to get red in the face, any time, anywhere, but Pickles can see him coloring up. Pickles can't be sure if Nathan is just really into anime girls or something, but whenever Pickles passes off the blunt to him, Nathan will make these little fleeting moments of eye contact and then bristle and look back at the screen. God, what the fuck is up with that?

Why does it feel fun?

“Gods, Pickle, I am so glad you makes up with this lady.”

Pickles offers a “yeah” in response. The body high he settles into is heavy, is lovely.

* * * *

When the movie ends, they decide to compose a song about getting murdered by a big robot lady that hates capitalism. Pickles pitches that they frame it so that the fans listening are all businessmen, because metalheads fucking hate suits, and they’ll think its funny. Nathan thinks that is a  _ very  _ good and funny idea, and so Pickles puts that information in with the rest of his cool and entertaining points he’s scored that evening. Pickles talks to Skwisgaar about the jazz licks he’d heard and then plays them for him, and Skwisgaar scoffs and plays them faster and smoother and better than Pickles can, and he adds notes for increased technical difficulty. He seems happy, about it, and that makes Pickles happy.

He likes it, being productive. Making things. It’s the only part of himself that he likes.

As it gets late in the day, the apartment starts to depopulate. Skwisgaar has a community college staff meeting to crash, and he says the word  _ philoscopy decartment  _ with multiple eyebrow jumps. Pickles has no idea what that could mean, aside from extra crepe-y skin. They get twenty minutes into some Jerry Springer before Murderface announces he is going to the skate park with his girlfriend, and Pickles asks him if he has a skateboard, and Murderface tells him that he just wants to watch her (and make sure that she’s not watching anyone, in case). Pickles has never known him to willingly miss the possibility of naked tits on the television, and so he is shocked and pleased by this personality development.

Maybe he’ll be a good kid, eventually.

Pickles tries to be cool and not concentrate on the fact that he ends up alone with Nathan, in waning daylight. Pickles tries very, very hard to focus in on the arguing couple on the screen. He can’t keep track of what is happening, because he keeps catching Nathan’s eye in the reflection of the screen. Usually Nathan will look at him, like that, if it happens, and he keeps looking away. Pickles is starting to lose his high, as it’s been a while, and he elects to start another blunt.

“You okay if I leave more of the tobacco in there?”

Nathan hums. When Pickles looks at him, Nathan immediately looks away, and it feels like he does it intentionally. Pickles can usually get a second of spare eye contact beforehand, and this time it instead feels like a panic. Pickles lets his eyebrows twitch together about it, and then goes about making his second blunt.

“You’re bein’ weird, dude.”

Nathan balls his fist up on the arm of the couch, and then straightens all of his fingers out again. He does that, a couple of times. Tension.

Pickles doesn’t like it.

“You keep... saying weird things.”

Pickles scoffs, and gets back to the task at hand: smoking enough that this conversation will not kill him via shame and heart palpitations.

“I dunno what you mean,” Pickles says, because he doesn’t. Nathan lets out this frustrated sigh, and resettles his whole body in his seat. Pickles knows he’s been weird to Skwisgaar-- and Magnus might say that, for sure, he has been being weird, but he can’t think of anything he’s said to Nathan that he wouldn’t normally say. It’s hard to piece through, though, because a lot has been happening the last few days. Pickles lights his blunt and takes a hit, and when he offers it to Nathan, Nathan takes it readily. It feels like a good sign.

After he takes his hit, finally, finally, he says something. “I think, uh. I think that you do.”

Pickles makes a face. That’s not what he was waiting for.

“I... don’t.”

“Oh,” Nathan tells him. Pickles can see this visceral discomfort bubbling up inside of him, and he wants to... help, and know what Nathan means, so that Nathan doesn’t have to feel like that. 

“I been gettin’ real, uh. I’ve been drinkin’ a lot, recently.”

Nathan nods, and it’s harder than he usually nods, so his hair jumps with him. He looks like a cartoon. Pickles wants to laugh at him, but he feels like probably that will make things  _ worse  _ and so he settles for smiling at him crooked.

“That’s-- that makes sense, uh. You were fucked up.”

Pickles hums. He crosses his legs on the couch, and takes the blunt back from Nathan so that he can take a long draw. He can see the smoke filter out in the air, lit up by the light of the television in the darkening room. He’s always liked that, the way it looks-- hypnotic, almost. Pickles ashes it into the ash tray before he passes it back.

“I was-- feelin’. I was havin’ a lot of feelings. I’m sorry if I said somethin’, dude.”

This seems to make Nathan panic more. He’s all red, and his shoulders go right up, like he thinks he’s a turtle and he can retract into his collarbones in order to avoid the conversation. Pickles offers him a laugh, for that one, even though Nathan doesn’t seem to notice that he’s doing it. It seems to put him at ease, at least to the extent that his shoulders drift an inch or two south. Pickles wonders if he was wrong earlier to repress it.

“I think we have to-- uh. Keep things normal. For... the band.”

“Yeah, dude, that’s-- I was tryin’ to be cool about it, ‘cause I really like what we’ve been doin’ recently. Are you-- you’re not feelin’ weird about it, right?”

Nathan huffs, and he crosses his arms.

“I don’t-- I don’t think I’m... not... allowed, uh. I think I get to feel weird about it. But I guess--”

Nathan squirms again, and settles on looking at Pickles in the reflection of the TV again.

“I guess... yeah. If you feel like you still want to be friends, I also-- really, uh. That. I would like that. So. Let’s. Keep. Doing. It.”

Pickles wonders what the fuck he said, to make it so weird. He was a massive dick to Skwisgaar, when Skwisgaar tried to talk to him. He doesn’t think Nathan would have tried something like that, because Nathan’s got his awkwardness tattooed on his bones, but he guesses whatever he said must have been pretty bad.

“Just, uh-- don’t-- you kept saying it in front of the other guys, I don’t know. When it was... once... I just let it go, but--”

Nathan shakes his head.

“Nevermind, since I guess you don’t... remember. It.”

Pickles wets his lips.

“Skwisgaar talked to me about it, so-- I mean I got all settled. All of what he was sayin’ made sense, you know? Just-- I didn’t wanna, you know, but he told me about these frogs or whatever.”

“Frogs?”

“Yeah, uh, and like I was a scorpion, and I killed a frog, he said, so-- basically I just gotta wait until after the record deal’s signed, and then, you know. If somethin’ happens, somethin’ happens.”

“Skwisgaar really said that?”

“Yeah, it was weird as hell. Guess those, uh--  _ philoscopy  _ professors really made an impression on him.” Pickles laughs at his own joke.

Nathan is extremely red, and he looks even more uncomfortable, and Pickles doesn’t know why it’s just getting worse if everything he’s saying is meant to fix it.

“Are you... planning on doing something about it? Uh, after the. After we sign?”

“I’m playin’ it by ear, dude, I don’t fuckin’ know. That’s the dangerous thing, you know? You don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

Nathan nods, and accepts the blunt back from him. He takes a long hit, and he watches Pickles head on for a while. Pickles isn’t used to that, Nathan staring at him, but when he exhales his hit out into the air he seems like he’s made up his mind about something. He’s all... resolute. He looks funny. Pickles smiles at him, easy.

“Okay,” Nathan says, finally.

“Okay?” Pickles asks him, because apparently nothing in this conversation is designed for him to know what Nathan means.

“I-- If you want to do something, uh. After the record deal. Let’s... see... what happens. I can-- I’ll, uh. I’ll try and be open, about it.”

“Cool,” Pickles tells him.

“Just don’t-- not in front of the guys, again.”

Pickles wants to ask Nathan a hundred questions, hearing him bringing up what he’d apparently said, again. He wishes for once that he could remember something that he’d drunk to forget, and it’s pure hell. Like when he went to the junior prom with Elizia Cartman, and he found out after the fact that he’d gotten to second base with her. That whole night was a blackout, and he’d been near tears finding out now everyone in school thought he was a lesbian and he didn’t even get to remember why.

Ah, but that’s a bad path. That’s a memory that only dregs up worse memories. Pickles shakes his head, and takes his blunt back for a long hit of his own.

“Whatever you say, chief.” 


End file.
